


Give Me Back My Broken Parts

by Lauralot, WhatEvenAmI



Series: Doctor's Orders [1]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Aftercare, Anal Fingering, Ass Play, Begging, Body Horror, Broken Bones, Bucky Barnes's Metal Arm, Dammit Murphy, Dammit Westfahl, Dehumanization, Dom Sam Wilson, Dom Steve Rogers, HYDRA Trash Party, Hand Jobs, Humiliation, Light Dom/sub, M/M, Medical Kink, Medical Procedures, Medical Torture, Medical Trauma, Mild Gore, Mind Control Aftermath & Recovery, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Pre-World War II Bucky Barnes/Steve Rogers, Rape Recovery, Roleplay, Self-Mutilation, Sexual Roleplay, Shame, Sub Bucky Barnes, Tenderness, Touching, Wetting
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-25
Updated: 2021-01-25
Packaged: 2021-03-13 17:01:32
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 39,254
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28906773
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lauralot/pseuds/Lauralot, https://archiveofourown.org/users/WhatEvenAmI/pseuds/WhatEvenAmI
Summary: “Can I get a verbal confirmation that we’re ready to begin the next phase of testing?” Steve whispers against Bucky's skin.Freshly in from the cold, Bucky finds himself deeply haunted by his past, and his medical trauma is taking serious a toll on his hopes of moving forward. Sam and Steve come up with an unconventional way to try and work through it with him.
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes/Steve Rogers
Series: Doctor's Orders [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2125176
Comments: 14
Kudos: 58





	Give Me Back My Broken Parts

**Author's Note:**

> Author's note from WhatEvenAmI: Due to a number of circumstances, small excerpts of this fic sat in my drafts for well over a year before the lovely and shameless trash enabler Lauralot came to my rescue and helped me revive it. Endless thanks to Lauralot for all your help, inspiration, and keysmashing in chat about this fic.

Bucky thrashes and clenches against the hand probing against his backside, holding back a noise of fear or desire or just pure overwhelm.

“Don’t hold back.” It’s still Steve’s eyes above the medical mask, steadily holding his gaze. Bucky lets himself whimper in anticipation, even though all his instincts are screaming at him that any signs of failure to cooperate will be harshly punished. His eyes are locked on Steve’s bright, piercing gaze. “Make as much noise as you need to. You can let it all out.”

He manages to let his breath out as Steve takes him in warm, strong hands. Resisting was never allowed, but now he wouldn’t want to. It’s Steve, Steve’s got him, making of Bucky what he will. He gasps as he’s turned over on the table, his hospital gown tugged open, exposing his ass to the air. Steve’s hand is rubbing it now and Bucky convulses, gasping again and again.

“That’s right.” He can’t see Steve’s eyes anymore, but it’s still his voice, warm and softer than any of the cold, clinical voices the techs used to use. “You’re safe, Bucky. You can yell if you need to yell. You can do whatever you need. I’ll take care of you the whole time. Let me hear you, okay?”

“Please…” Bucky begs softly into the table. Begging for Steve to hurry up, but hovering on the edge of fear and memory. “Oh, God...please…”

“Of course,” comes Steve’s voice right away, and his big calloused hand gently spreads Bucky’s asscheeks wide apart.

*

The Soldier lays immobile on the table.

He thinks there used to be a different table, with clamps to hold him down. He vaguely remembers someone complaining about the cost of reinforcing the clamps when he strained them again and again.

It doesn’t matter anymore. Restraints are no longer needed; he is capable of remaining still for every procedure, regardless of pain or discomfort. He thinks he used to have negative feelings about the procedures, which was a critical inconvenience and undermined his reputation for efficiency. His reputation is impeccable now.

The thawing process is complete, and that one is the hardest to withstand, although it’s the easiest one for which to maintain compliance. For the first half hour or so out of the cryo tank, his body is unresponsive, slow to regain feeling. To move or speak would be a monumental effort, and it’s easiest to just let himself be maneuvered around as the techs do what they need to do to ensure his body is regaining functionality. With the abating of numbness comes terrible pain, and it’s a tribulation he can’t quite describe, lying heavy and nearly immobile while hands poke and prod at his body, move his limbs, shine bright lights into his eyes and ears and nostrils. But at least it makes it easier to hold still and refrain from erratic violations of parameters.

He hears the doors to the vault clanking heavily. It’s not time for him to be moved yet, so it’s possible someone is coming with an additional number of procedures to aid in the coming mission. Even though it is inefficient and of no use for him to want, he feels a twinge of impatience, quietly hoping this won’t take long. Procedures are so time-consuming already, even with his body’s high processing speed, and they’re not usually like the tasks given to him in the field, which can be completed more quickly or more easily by using his strength or his talent for rapid strategizing. That’s why this part makes it so difficult to remain compliant: mostly, there’s nothing to do but wait and endure whatever needs to be done.

Sometimes he is rewarded, though. Last time he thinks it was a piece of hard candy that he savored on his tongue the whole ride to the dropoff. He thinks he regretted having to swallow it when it came time to exit the van. 

“Nearly done with this one.” That’s the technician who’s been working on him. “The mechanical arm is fully responsive, it’s breathing independently, full muscular capability is regained.” He lowers his voice. “That part can never come soon enough. Damn, Westfahl, you should have seen it shit when it was just out of the tank. And of course I had to stay right on top of cleanup in case the Secretary came down. Wouldn’t want to get caught neglecting his baby. You know I studied in medical ten years straight to get here, and that’s on top of my time in university? No one told me I was killing myself to mop piles of nuclear ass waste from whatever some moron decided to give it last time it was out.”

“Was he fed solids last time? I know the Secretary usually prefers that he’s not.” That’s another male voice, younger and a little higher. “Murphy was in pretty hot water for passing around those homemade compost cakes of his a few years back.”

The Soldier doesn’t know why his body prickles hot with shame. Bodily functions occur naturally while he’s thawing out from storage. It’s always been standard maintenance procedure to hose down the thawing chamber as this happens. He hadn’t thought the techs were passing _judgment_ on the matter that comes out of him during the process.

“Compost cakes?”

He shouldn’t care how they feel about it, but he worries that they might punish him. And it rankles even though he’s not supposed to _feel_ in this way—their bodies would produce the same waste if they were thawing. It’s not his _fault_ he can’t control it—is it? They couldn’t hold it in either, they _couldn’t_. He’s the Winter Soldier, they’re standard humans. They shouldn’t be mocking him. He _hates_ , suddenly, and with a ferocity that surprises him (how does a weapon learn to hate?) that they have any ammunition to do so.

“Vegan brownies. You’ve never been treated to his desserts with hidden kale in? But that time, shit, I thought the idiot might actually get himself executed for getting too excited about his own cooking.”

The Soldier racks his brains, but he cannot remember the incident. He makes a note to himself, now that he knows: eat nothing that isn’t directly authorized by a Commander or the Secretary himself. It does distress him somewhat that he may not remember this on future missions. He doesn’t want to compromise his reputation ever again.

“Oh, that. I didn’t end up seeing that, myself. I hadn’t transferred to this department yet.” The first technician begins packing up the tools he uses to examine the metal arm. “From what I heard, Murphy got so excited someone actually wanted to eat those blocks of shit that he kept feeding it till it destroyed a van puking it all up. And STRIKE thinks _we_ handle this thing badly.” The Soldier nearly flinches as a hand unexpectedly slaps a couple times on his bare abdomen. “You think it needs an enema?”

“Leave it to Murph to have all his fatalities conducted through his cooking. And I wouldn’t bother with an enema, if he’s regained control of himself. Sounds like he cleared out whatever it was that was causing that particular malfunction. But if he needs a rectal exam, you know I’ll be right _on top_ of it. Go take your lunch. And while you’re upstairs, find out who the hell fed him last time and rearrange their ass where their head used to be. Might help ‘em think better.”

The first technician is walking away. “You’re a sick bastard, Westfahl,” he calls from the doorway. “If Pierce catches you, I know literally nothing about this, got it? No reason we both gotta get put down.” The mechanisms are working; the Soldier can hear the door clanking shut again. “And STRIKE wants him dressed and ready in twenty minutes, so you’d better be done quickly.”

Excellent, a verified time cap on procedures before he’s on to his mission. That’s like several rewards in one. Not knowing can be the hardest to withstand, aside from open-abdominal surgery.

The door to the vault slams shut, reverberating in the small room, and Agent Westfahl leans over him, pulling on a pair of medical gloves. “Did you hear that, Soldier?” he asks, meeting his gaze. “You’re going to need a rectal exam before you go. Can you hold still and keep quiet for me?”

The Soldier nods, holding his gaze. He’s confident that he can. When he was still a work in progress they needed a table with restraints because he had not learned to withstand pain, and he’s sure he hindered HYDRA’s progress more than he contributed to it. But that’s not the case now; he can be perfectly compliant. He always is.

*

It’s not like Bucky tried to put his past humiliations on display. 

It hadn’t even occurred to him that they’d come out in the ways that they did. He’s not naive; he’d known on many levels that the past isn’t always just the past. He’d even told that to Steve—when he finally agreed to come home with him, after many cornerings in alleyways and abandoned apartments, and a few run-ins when they went after some of the same HYDRA goons. Bucky was loath to put his trust in anyone, in those first weeks on the run, with only snippets of memories with no context behind them. Though what resurfaced in his mind about Steve left him feeling like maybe he’d be an adequate (he refused to let himself think about _better than adequate_ , to trust in his own volatile emotions) fallback in case he ended up in any really dire need, it also left him feeling nervous for an entire new set of reasons.

“I can’t be him. The person I was,” he’d said quietly, feeling his heartbeat pick up as he said it. Every instinct he had still screamed against revealing intimate information. He couldn’t really remember much, so how could he be sure that Steve was trustworthy. “I wouldn’t remember how to be him if I could.”

Steve held his gaze, his expression never changing, but Bucky had still been terrified of the way this man seemed to hold Bucky’s heartstrings in one hand. His eyes were so sincere. No one had given him such a profoundly _human_ look in literal decades, not even Pierce when he was working the Soldier to think they were united in a noble fucking cause. “I know that, Buck. You don’t have to be.”

Bucky had had to force himself to hold Steve’s gaze. He didn’t honestly think Steve was a threat, or at least, that he’d want to be one to Bucky. There were a number of threatening things he could still do, though, not least of which was dragging Bucky in to be examined by whatever was left of SHIELD. He’d last seen Bucky as the Soldier, and he had good reason to be approaching him like he was a wild animal. “What do you want me to be, then?”

His eyes were undeniably wistful, which tugged uncomfortably at Bucky, but he’d said “I want you to have the chance to decide that for yourself, Buck.”

And Bucky had finally known he could stop resisting. He’d been fatigued and hungry as hell—it was damn hard to feed his souped-up metabolism on the run—and he’d had a couple of his former captors on his tail for several weeks. He was paranoid, exhausted, and it’d be nice if he could rely on some backup. With all the memory he’d had at the time, it was hard to know for sure he could trust anyone to run backup for him at all. But none of his captors, in all of seventy years, had told him he could decide who to be. 

He’d still been jittery and hypervigilant, following Steve home and responding to his tentative questions in yeses or nos only. But it seemed like he really could believe that Steve only wanted him to come in because he was concerned. That he really wasn’t trying to make Bucky fight alongside him as he’d (apparently? The memories were still faint and hard to hold onto) done before, or use him to gain intel, or even try to make him be the Bucky he’d once been. After decades of knowing only people who needed to use him for one purpose or another, it was hard to trust that someone wanted him close to them only to make sure he was doing okay. But if he could trust anyone’s motivations, it would have to be Steve Rogers. Bucky had prodded through his Swiss-cheese brain enough to be sure of that before going in with him.

It wasn’t until he got to the apartment and saw the room Steve had prepared for him just in case he’d ever needed a place to crash that he really, fully understood. It wasn’t a cell, nothing like it. It didn’t even seem to be bugged or monitored, though Bucky privately thought that given his past it would have been advisable for Steve to take those precautions. The Soldier had been given rooms on long missions, but they were bare and utilitarian, containing only the weapons and tactical clothing he would need to run missions, or any props he might need on a covert op. The kind of things that would belong to whoever he was pretending to be, as opposed to anything that was really _his_.

But Steve had converted a nice, sunlit room he’d been using as a drawing studio into a bedroom for Bucky. He’d given him a big double bed with an ornate headboard and blue flannel covers. He’d set up a chest of drawers filled with clothes upon clothes upon clothes, soft sweatpants and a variety of jeans, socks and sweaters and multiple sets of pajamas. In the closet hung a number of additional garments, and an array of jackets as well. There was even a kit for Bucky to store his knives. He’d wondered if Steve would make him check those at the door—he would have, if he was dealing with himself—but no. Steve would rather leave Bucky armed and ready to defend himself than guard his own back. 

That’s when Bucky really got it. Steve didn’t just want Bucky to come in so he could keep an eye on him. He wanted to be _good_ to him.

Bucky sat down hard on the flannel bedspread. It was a hard-hitting revelation, even though he realized he’d sort of known it all along. Steve had been his friend, and friendship meant being good to one another without question. He’d been a person who’d known that, once—not in a logical sense, as an outsider examining human beings to better use their own tendencies against him, but on a more deep and innate level. He’d been this good to Steve, once, in a different lifetime, and that’s why Steve had done all this for him now. Why he’d been given a bedroom Steve had kept waiting for him on the off chance he’d needed a home base and trusted him enough to come in, rather than a locked, monitored cell in wherever SHIELD HQ was now located. 

_Who do you want me to be, then?_

_I want you to have the chance to decide that for yourself, Buck._

Bucky resolved, though he knew he wasn’t really sure how, to be that good to Steve again.

He felt like he’d kind of fallen short of that resolution later that night after he’d launched himself off the bed mid-nightmare and drove his metal fist through Steve’s wall. He was a menace to society _and_ to Steve’s security deposit.

Steve had seemed more concerned about Bucky than about the wall, though. He’d knelt carefully on the floor where Bucky had landed, feeling pretty stupid now that he realized he was crouched in a fighting position surrounded by pillows and plaster dust. “Hey. Hey, Buck, you’re safe. You remember where you are?”

Bucky had nodded. He did realize, now, that he was in Steve’s apartment, in the room Steve had set up for him, the one that he’d been using as an art studio. Part of him was still lying on a surgical table trying not to react for the doctors when Zola had leaned over him, and he’d woken up trying to punch the frog-faced fucker through a bunker he hadn’t inhabited in seventy some-odd years. He still couldn’t bring himself to speak, to make a sound, the part of him still lingering back on HYDRA’s table screaming at him that speaking up meant worse tortures to come. He was sure his wild-eyed silence wasn’t doing much for Steve’s assurance of his lucidity, but Steve just stayed with him and told Bucky he’d had pretty violent nightmares himself most nights after he’d been thawed out and brought home. 

The nightmares seemed to get worse the longer Bucky stayed in the apartment. He’d had them on the run, and hallucinations and false memories he’d had to sort through, especially when he was withdrawing from the chemical cocktail HYDRA had pumped into him to reduce critical thought processes. He had remembered, while they were still adjusting the dosing, Pierce ripping into some tech who’d loaded him so full of antipsychotics he couldn’t figure out how to put on his tac gear. He’d watched with a sort of bemused fuzziness, wearing nothing but underpants and tac pants pooled around his ankles, as his flesh hand had jerked and flopped around at his side, independent of his say-so. They’d had no choice but to call off the mission and let the Soldier stare blankly into a wall for countless hours. They’d tried to at least use the time spent drugged to influence his thought patterns, but he’d been confusingly unable to repeat back anything they’d said to him. He’d been mostly just gone, an outside observer of his own consciousness.

It had almost been a pleasant break from being mentally present through the rest of his hellish existence. Almost.

He was never as bad at Steve’s house as he was when he was coming off the drugs, puking every which way and seeing weird shit that couldn’t possibly be _real_ (though he couldn’t be sure, he’s _lived_ shit that shouldn’t have been able to be real) and watching half-realized memories play out rapidly over and over no matter how hard he squeezed his eyes shut—but his body had seemed to know, sleeping rough, that he had to stay on some level of alert. In his new bedroom, the city noises were too muted, the air was too warm, the blankets too soft. His sleeping mind allowed him to access new depths, and in them lurked the very birth of his terrors.

The prickle of Zola’s voice creeping across his skin. Needles in an unmarked arm and a rush of fire in his veins. The crackle and spark of blue above his head, a grim metal halo circling in.

He was always sweating through his clothes when he woke up. Always clenching his teeth to hold back screams. He helped Steve patch up the wall and paint it over. He peeled off sweat-soaked pajamas and threw them in the laundry. He did push-ups in the darkness to bleed off everything he’d wanted to shout into the night. 

He’d wondered if going back to the streets would make it stop, but when Steve’s shrink friend with the wings came to talk to him, he didn’t think that’s the case. Sam thought that Bucky’s brain was finally “processing his trauma”—that getting to a safe place where he didn’t have to fight means his brain let loose with a million feelings and visceral reactions it’d been holding back. He’d thought he was in rough shape before, but apparently his mind had PTSD: Level Two Point Oh on hold for him, and Sam said there might be more new shit yet to come. 

It took all Bucky had not to drive his fist through a wall in that first meeting. He’d already gone through a lifetime of suffering; what the hell was the point in getting free if he’d still be trapped by the memories for the rest of his existence?

Sam must have sensed that Bucky was near his breaking point, because he changed the subject immediately after. For a while, his visits weren’t about Bucky’s health. It was just acclimating Bucky to Sam, showing him that there was a non-Steve person in the world who wasn’t out to get him.

And while Bucky couldn’t say that he really _trusted_ Sam, Steve did. And Sam didn’t push. Whenever Bucky went tense, arm whirring or teeth grinding, Sam backed off. He understood boundaries that Bucky didn’t have the nerve to say aloud. He was as close to safe as anyone other than Steve could get.

Until today.

Bucky’s nightmares are ramping up again, and the fears are carrying over into the daytime now. Steve couldn’t help himself from bringing it up when Sam came over, asking for his advice on what to do with him. Now Bucky can feel Sam studying him and it’s like he’s flayed open, pinned between slides to be analyzed.

“Seventy years, man,” Sam says, shaking his head. “I’m not gonna lie, I’ve never worked with anyone who’d been through exactly the kind of thing you have. You might be a pretty unique case. But if you ever want, I’ll find you the best therapists, doctors, anything you need.”

“I can’t trust people who aren’t Steve,” Bucky says flatly, staring his hands on the table, flesh intertwined with cold metal. They’ve had this discussion before, and his answer hasn’t changed. Sam’s gaze is too steady, too warm. It feels like he can see right through him. Bucky doesn’t like being seen through. “How would you vet the shrink?”

“I can see how it would be hard for you to open up after everything you’ve been through. But I really think—don’t get me wrong, Steve’s a real badass—I really think you shouldn’t be trying to get through this without professional help. I would personally figure out a way to vet them for you.” Bucky isn’t sure how to respond to this personal diligence from a guy he’d nearly murdered a couple months back, but Sam presses on after a pause. “A good therapist keeps your information private. They wouldn’t use it against you.”

“I _know_ that,” Bucky says, or at least he knows from Sam’s earnest tone that that’s been _his_ experience in his field. “Too many risk factors with that kind of shit, though. I’m not doing it.” Steve, of course, immediately takes on an expression of concern, but he doesn’t say Bucky has to go. He never forces Bucky, even though at that point Bucky kind of _wants_ Steve to just force him rather than looking at him like that.

“Fair. That’s fair. Look, I’m dropping it for now. But I’m going to come back around to it at some point. Might be worth a shot to have somebody take a look at that arm in the meantime, though.”

Bucky feels the dull thump of his heart hammering in his ears, throat constricting as he tries and fails to swallow. “Why?” His voice is louder than he intended, his flesh knuckles going white in the grip of the metal ones. “There’s no trackers in it.”

Not that he’s ever permitted anyone near enough to him to _check_ for trackers, but if HYDRA had a way to hunt him down, they’d have done it by now. Probably.

“Is this the longest you’ve been awake?” Sam asks. “They never kept you out of the ice this long, did they?”

Bucky doesn’t say he can’t remember. That they wouldn’t let him remember. He doesn’t know where Sam is going with this and he’s uneasy enough without opening up about his vulnerabilities to the guy who just said he’d stop prying into them. Sam is still staring right through him and Bucky wishes that when they’d fought on the helicarrier, the Soldier would have found a way to gouge those eyes out. “So?” he asks stiffly.

“So it’s probably worth making sure having half your body weight in steel welded onto your shoulder isn’t doing you permanent damage,” Sam says. “That prosthetic may not be designed for constant use.”

“Bucky?” Steve asks.

Bucky guesses he’s gone pale or maybe gasped, even though all he can hear now is his heartbeat, louder with each second. It would explain that furrowed brow, wide-eyed look Steve’s giving him.

“Bucky?”

It’s his arm. It’s _his_ arm. He used it to try and crush a Nazi’s throat as soon as he first woke to find it there, and if he lets someone take it away, he’d be defenseless. He has to be able to fight back. It’s _his_ and they couldn’t control it even with their restraints, they had to break his mind to the point that any order to stay still would override the arm’s capability of tearing apart whoever was causing him pain, and he won’t let some doctor cut through flesh and bone to hack it off, he won’t let them tell him to be still ever again, he won’t let them touch any part of him, metal or skin or bone—

The bones in his right hand crack in the vice of his prosthetic. Blood wells from where the metal bites through skin. He can hear his breathing now, as loud and fast as his heart, and he stares down at his bloody, broken hand because he knows if he looks up that Steve’s eyes will be wider and wetter and so, so sad.

*

The Soldier is trembling.

That isn’t permitted, but the technicians don’t seem to care. Their focus is locked on the metal arm; most of its plates have been pried off, giving the prosthetic a dead, hollow look, like a bare tree in the winter. The technicians have thin, lighted tools that dig around inside his arm, and every scrape and stab sets off lightning behind the Soldier’s eyes, as if he’s strapped down in the chair.

It _feels_ like he’s in the chair: Rivulets of sweat run down his skin, soaking into the examination table below him. His body pulses with aftershocks the Soldier cannot control, though every fiber of his conscious mind is fighting to remain still. Even the bite guard is in his mouth, thick and firm and reaching so far back it’s a struggle not to gag.

The bite guard is there because the technicians were worried the Soldier would break his teeth when he clenched his jaw.

They must not be that concerned, though, because at first they had wanted the Soldier to speak. They’d wanted his feedback on the results of their prodding.

Something happened in the field. A frag grenade cut through the plates of his arm as easily as one of his own knives might slide between ribs. Something inside broke. The Soldier doesn’t know what it was, and if the technicians had explained, he hadn’t heard. The prosthetic is damaged and now every touch against it sends the signal to his mind: PAIN. Every flare of sensation is worse than the last, and the technicians have been trying to repair him for well over an hour now. PAIN. _PAIN._ **_PAIN._**

He doubts the technicians bothered to explain the error during one of the Soldier’s many lapses of agony-induced blindness and deafness. They hadn’t been troubled when they asked him to speak and he couldn’t form words, his throat as limp and exhausted as the rest of him. He hadn’t wanted to try any harder, certain his voice would betray something sobbing and wretched and _weak_. He’d thought then that he shouldn’t have that weakness, but he can’t think much of anything anymore. Thoughts are interrupted by sudden, vibrant blooms of pain that make him forget everything around him.

He’d thought he’d be punished for refusing to attempt speech further, but they’d chalked it up to malfunction. At least they can’t see the things that are wretched and _human_ chipping away at his strength from the core while their fingers twist and turn in the jolting centers of his agony.

“Latest wipe probably damaged his speech facilities again,” one of them had said, before ordering the Soldier to indicate whether or not the pain was lessening by signing with his flesh hand.

The Soldier doesn’t remember losing the ability to speak before. He’s finding it hard to remember anything beyond this moment. He’s focused on trying to remember the signs he’s supposed to give so they can make this _stop_. He’d barely been able to see the tech’s hands when she showed him. His vision was whiting out with lightning and it had seemed to crack her words in half along with it.

He hopes he hasn’t pissed himself. The thought bursts through him in a sudden, horrible flare that’d make him flinch if he could move at all through the pain. There’s a drain beneath the chair for that, but there isn’t one in the surgical theater. Mostly no one blames him if he does it in the chair; the reprogramming process causes a full-body override. His tac pants are soaked; sweat and blood, or at least he hopes that’s all it is. He can’t tell anymore. If he pisses during maintenance they’ll be mocking him for missions to come. He has before, and they always do. It gives him a damn hard job of salvaging his reputation in the field.

One of the doctor’s tools lights up in a harsh flare of blue and the Soldier’s field of vision is all stars, his mind flaming needles. He can’t care about future missions, or if he’s being mocked, or if he’s showing any weakness. He can only care about needles and light and desperation for everything to _end_. He bites onto the bitter-tasting rubber of the bite guard to hold back a moan, though why he must hold it back he cannot for the life of him remember.

In the field, an agent had grabbed the Soldier’s arm, trying to haul him back to their convoy. The Soldier saw his face before he made contact, pale and uncertain because the Soldier was huddled on the ground and the Soldier was never to react that way. He knew better than to compromise the mission.

Then the agent had taken hold of the Soldier’s arm and his grip felt like needles. Thousands of millions of needles, biting impossibly into metal and shooting _acid_ through wiring and circuitry and into his blood. The Soldier hadn’t been able to see then. His eyes were blinded with the same acid eating into everything else.

When the pain ebbed, the man’s arm was in the Soldier’s grasp, detached from the agent’s body. The skin and fabric at the shoulder were both ragged. The agent was shrieking on the ground. His screams made the Soldier’s head pound almost as badly as his touch had.

The Soldier had dropped the arm and swallowed back bile.

Something pulls inside him and fire screams through his blood, arcing across every nerve again and again. No part of him is left untouched; the pain sears over each inch, branding its presence deep in every last pore. He cannot even shake anymore. The only movement now is the sweat dripping from his aching body and the tears pooling involuntarily at the corners of his eyes.

Then there is a different touch: skin on skin. The back of a technician’s hand connects with the Soldier’s face, knocking his head to the side. He does not see lightning this time. The force of the hit is nothing but a whisper compared to the fire in his blood. It’s grounding. Almost pleasant.

“I didn’t say you could stop signing.” The technician wipes sweat from her own brow. “Either do as you’re told or the Secretary will hear that his prized attack dog is compromising its own effectiveness.”

“Please,” the Soldier whispers.

He doesn’t mean to say it. He flinches as he does. It’s not his place to question. To beg. He is a weapon. He exists to serve. They will punish him for talking back, and it will be even worse than the burning he feels now.

But the technicians don’t respond. They don’t hear him through the bite guard.

The Soldier does not have time to feel relieved before the white-hot fire blazes through him once again.

  
*

“This is going to feel a little cold,” Steve’s voice is soft, but clinical. His hand is firm on Bucky’s ass, spreading it wide, but it’s not forceful or invasive. It’s Steve’s voice, Steve’s touch, Steve won’t go further if he doesn’t think Bucky’s ready. Bucky breathes into the table, missing the warmth of Steve’s hand when he removes it. He can hear Steve rubbing something together between his hands. 

“I’ve gotten this a little bit warm for you, and I’m going to apply it now, if you’ll relax for me.” Relaxing is hard, and Bucky nearly ruts himself against the table in anticipation. The hand is back, gentle, and the lube he’s using isn’t cold but Bucky finds himself shivering as Steve carefully moves his hand back between his asscheeks. He finds himself releasing a soft noise of anticipation and his stomach clenches, but Steve just says “That’s right. You can make noise if you need to. This is a confidential examination.”

Carried by his voice, Bucky allows himself to lean in a little bit. He bites his lip and moans with anticipation, pushing his hips down a little, rubbing himself against the table for release. He shudders. The movement pushes his ass tightly shut again, but it’s Steve. He’ll get back in there without being forceful. Bucky softens, anticipating his touch.

“That’s right. You’re doing so well for me. Showing me what you need.” And there’s his hand again, massaging Bucky’s bottom, firmly cupping and gripping each cheek. Nothing hurts. He’s in Steve’s hands and nothing hurts and nothing will hurt because it’s his body and it’s all Steve’s, Steve can be good and warm and firm and will handle his body exactly how it needs to be handled, no more than that. 

Bucky didn’t realize he wanted to cry until the warm tears slip out. He presses his face against the table as Steve’s hand slips between his asscheeks again, rubbing the lube against his asshole and gently probing his slippery fingers inside the slightest bit. Stretching him, prepping him more gently than anyone’s ever done for him. “You’re doing great,” Steve informs him, and Bucky’s body responds to his deep timbre with a shuddering breath betraying his teary face. He tenses against Steve’s sliding fingers and then there’s Steve’s other hand on his shoulder, massaging at his neck, gently tracing where metal meets skin. “That’s all right,” he assures, “You’re doing so good. Go ahead and make noise for me, you can cry for me. You’re doing so good, letting me take care of you like this.”

Bucky sobs with mingled pleasure and fear as Steve’s finger slowly works against his resistance, the other hand easing the hardness he’s carried in his shoulders, smearing lube against his neck as he works. He manages to relax almost without thinking about it, and Steve’s finger meets the lack of resistance down below, sliding carefully within him and holding him there very still. He must have felt Bucky freeze.

“You’re all right. I’m finding no abnormalities. And we can just stay here for a second. The next test I’m about to conduct is going to feel a little strange, but I think you’ll find some helpful release in it when it’s done. And I need your response to know how I’m doing. You can tell me verbally, or make noise for me...or both,” Steve’s voice drops low and Bucky shivers and contracts around his finger, involuntary. “I’ll need your feedback to get accurate results...and to know how to proceed.” He’s not massaging anymore; his voice is getting closer and then his lips are brushing against Bucky’s spine, making him shiver all the harder. The paper mask scratches a little in their wake; Steve must have worked it down with his tongue. Bucky shudders as a wave of arousal grips him from the stomach down in spite of himself. He presses against the table again.

Steve kisses slowly down the spine, drawing warm tingling all the way down Bucky’s back, leaving a wet, probing kiss with his tongue at the very top of his ass. Bucky wants to melt into it. Wants him to kiss like that some more, all over him. 

“Can I get a verbal confirmation that we’re ready to begin the next phase of testing?” Steve whispers against his skin.

Bucky’s scared to speak. He never speaks, not like this, not showing himself like this, but Steve’s face is nuzzled up against his asscheek now, his breath a whisper against Bucky’s body. He nods into the table but he doesn’t know if Steve can see it with his face all the way down at his lower end. He grips onto the table and writhes with the beautiful agony of it all.

“I need verbal confirmation,” Steve’s back up, running his hand along Bucky’s side. “But you don’t have to tell me until you’re ready. I’m staying right here until you give me the green light, understand?”

Bucky’s in charge now. He’s never been in charge. Steve’s going to do whatever he does to him, but he’ll let Bucky wait as long as he needs to say yes or no. To speak. To confirm what he’s getting from all their testing. He’s not just an instrument, he’s not, he’s Steve’s and he has a part in all this.

And even though he wants Steve to continue he just shakes and shakes and more tears slip out. He cries with Steve’s finger in his ass for a good moment before he realizes he’s allowed to speak while he cries. Steve can know. This examination is confidential. No one outside this room has to know.

It takes a minute before he can make himself do it, though. Say anything at all, say anything with his broken and shuddery voice. He takes several deep breaths into the table while Steve gently massages his ass and the top of his thigh, holding one thick warm finger steadily in the center of all Bucky’s pleasure and pain. 

“Y-yes,” Bucky makes himself gasp, his face wet against the cushioning of the table. “Yes. Ready.” 

He flinches at the sound of his rough and wet voice, vulnerable and weak, but Steve says, “Good job. Thank you, Bucky. Let’s proceed to find where you can get release.” And Bucky strains to keep from gasping when Steve crooks his finger. He squeezes his eyes shut, braced for flashes of lightning that never come. Instead, Steve’s searching the inside of him and telling him, “I need results, Bucky. Tell me what feels good. Show me, I know you can show me.” And there’s his finger right in the lightning, not behind his eyes but down low, and Steve’s orders were _show me_ so Bucky lets his body shake and his hips jerk against the table, a small groan rising in his throat.

“Thank you,” Steve says, his voice a little rough, probing around the same spot while Bucky desperately pushes back onto his hand. “You’re doing so well.” And he probes there again and Bucky lets the groan out, long and loud and so _human_ , and Steve meets him by pushing harder against that magical spot.

“That’s highly conclusive, thank you, Bucky, thank you,” And Steve’s definitely panting just a little but he manages to keep his voice so calm and clinical. “You’re doing so well. I’m thinking we could proceed to a more intensive stage of testing with two fingers, and then with three. Are you ready to start with the second?”

Encouraged, Bucky lets another loud groan slip out. He’s not crying anymore, Steve’s holding all of his fear and pain so carefully. “Yes,” his voice cracks a little. “Do what you need to do to me to...fix me, Steve.” It’s all coming out now, breaking the dam of his silence. “Fix it, just fix me, I just want you to make me okay, do it, Steve.” Embarrassed, a little, by this display (and the irony isn’t lost on him, that this is what makes him embarrassed when Steve is literally staring at his asshole) he clenches his teeth and quiets again, but Steve rubs his thigh, encouraging.

“Okay, that’s very informative feedback, you’re doing so great, I just need to test, before I continue, your heartbeat and your pulse, okay?” Bucky’s vision goes a little white again as Steve moves, his finger still firmly lodged inside him, shifting around to stand at Bucky’s side. He’s bending over Bucky then, Bucky can’t see him but he can feel the warmth of him over his back, the lab coat he’s wearing brushing against Bucky’s bare back. “Ready?” he whispers. “I’m going to check your heartbeat now.”

Bucky nods frantically, wanting Steve to do more of whatever he’s going to do, hold him, hold all of him at once. And Steve’s warm body in the lab uniform presses against his side and his ribs and Steve is softly counting the rapid beating of his heart, and Bucky can feel it thrumming in his chest, pressed between Steve’s lab-coated chest and the table. “And your pulse,” Steve whispers against Bucky’s back, sliding his hand along Bucky’s ribcage and around to his shoulder and neck, rubbing lightly at the scarline where metal plating meets skin. His hand is firm and warm, carefully parting his hair to get at the soft human fluttering of his jugular and Bucky can let him be there even though it nearly makes him freeze. Steve can let him be human. 

His hair and his pulse and Steve’s fingers are joined, soft in thrumming like a bird fluttering its wings. His heartbeat is against Steve’s chest and his pulse is against Steve’s hand and Steve counts them both and says, “Good, good, that’s good. Your results are good, and they’re strong, and we’re ready to proceed.” But before he rises he slides his hand from Bucky’s throat up his chin and strokes lube-sticky fingers lightly against his cheek.

Then he’s rising, leaving Bucky cold and craving him back against his skin. But Steve’s got his legs parted and ass spread again, he’s not going anywhere, he’ll be holding Bucky in some way no matter where he is. And as he finally slides the first finger out a second finger probes back in with it. This time Steve is much slower sliding into him, working circles around his asshole and wriggling a bit till Bucky grunts. He’s not holding it back anymore. Steve needs input. He needs to know. Bucky’s allowed to let him hear. He’s doing _good_.

“We’ll need to apply this more liberally,” Steve observes, and this time the squirt of lube onto his asshole really is cold but Bucky doesn’t care anymore. Steve wriggles it in and Bucky manages to relax, hips jerking against the table again. The tremors are pooling in his abdomen and suddenly he wonders if he’ll make it to three fingers. Steve manages to work his two in home and crook them just so, finding the spot immediately, the one that makes Bucky arch his back and push his ass up off the table right into Steve’s hands. A gasp escapes him. He wants to— _can’t_ —wants to beg for more.

“Good job,” Steve whispers, his masked face pressing up against Bucky’s asscheek again, making him jump. “Good job, Bucky, good.”

*

Broken fingers are easy to set.

The Soldier did that almost every time he went into the field. The enhanced strength behind his punches snapped his own bones as easily as his targets’, if a blow didn’t land exactly as intended. He couldn’t say when resetting his fingers had become second nature—the wipes had taken that knowledge—but the transits back to base that he could recall nearly always involved snapping already-mending bones back to their proper position.

A broken hand is different.

Bucky’s sure that he’s broken his hand before, but he has no memory of doing so, let alone setting it. And if he had ever broken it this badly before, he couldn’t have set it on his own. When Sam had said he should see a doctor, Bucky had _shattered_ his hand from clenching up so hard. The bones from his wrist all the way up to his fingertips are in pieces. He can’t fix them. He doesn’t even know where he’d _start_.

Even now, with the bruising and swelling all but gone thanks to his accelerated healing, his hand is a mess. It’s bent and wrong and he can’t bear to look at it. Both Steve and Sam had pleaded all of yesterday to take him to a hospital. An urgent care center. Anything.

Steve had been so pale and worried. He’s looked that way all morning too.

Sam probably looks similar—he slept over, presumably out of fear that either Bucky or Steve or both of them would stubborn themselves to death if left unsupervised—but Bucky wouldn’t know. He hasn’t left his room today, and Sam hasn’t come in.

He can’t risk seeing Sam. Sam has a horrible way of making dangerous things seem reasonable. And Bucky’s hand is still aching and Steve is hovering and if Bucky listens to Sam now, he could end up in a hospital. Strapped to a table. Burning and bleeding and fighting to keep tears from spilling from his eyes, rubber in his mouth and scalpels on his skin, gloved hands shoving inside him, rearranging organs and pulling out shrapnel and—

Bucky won’t let anyone touch him, not ever again. He’d rather lose his hand. He doesn’t need it anyway. He has the prosthetic.

Unless Sam is right and it ends up failing too.

Bucky shudders, swallowing back bile. He feels Steve rub at his shoulders and jerks away, unable to keep from snapping. “I’m _fine_.”

“Bucky,” Steve begs. “I won’t let anyone hurt you. I’m so, so sorry that HYDRA did before. But I promise, I’d kill anyone who tries now. Don’t torture yourself like this. You’re safe with me.”

He is safe with Steve. But _only_ Steve. And there’s no way Bucky can make him understand that. Steve never woke up with his arm _gone_ and replaced with some sci-fi prop, smelling the burning flesh where his skin fused with metal.

Steve was never a _weapon_ to be stripped and disassembled and made to fit whatever specifications HYDRA needed that day. He doesn’t know, and Bucky doesn’t have the words for it.

“No,” he mutters finally. It’s the only word he does have, and he still has to choke it out. He knows Steve won’t punish him for saying that, but the knowing doesn’t stop the fear.

“What can I do, Buck?” Steve’s hand is back on his shoulder now, and the other one is on his back. Bucky doesn’t pull away this time; moving around makes his hand hurt worse. “What can I do to show you you’re safe? Anything, if you’ll let someone help, I’ll do anything that—”

“You fix it.”

Bucky doesn’t mean to say it. But he _remembers_ , suddenly, walking away from a prison camp, starved and aching, with Zola’s chemicals burning in his blood. Steve had let Bucky sling an arm over his impossibly broad shoulders as he limped through the night. The memory blooms in his head, dragging up others. Steve wrapping a bandage around Bucky’s leg once the Commandos were safely away from some forgotten battle. Steve pressing a handkerchief to Bucky’s lip, when Steve was small and they were young and Bucky must have gotten involved in one of Steve’s fights.

Steve is safe. And Steve knows enough medical shit to have survived the war and aliens and the Winter Soldier. His mother was a nurse. Steve will fix this. Bucky can choke down his panic and let Steve set his hand. It’s _Steve_.

“I—I can’t.”

Bucky does pull away then, jaw tensing as anger flares through him. “Yes, you can.” He’s trying to compromise. Steve is the only one he’ll let touch him and even then, the thought of Steve hurting him like the doctors used to makes Bucky want to run. Bucky’s being reasonable, and Steve’s just making excuses. “You’ve done it before.”

“That—Bucky, I know first aid. That’s it. I could set broken fingers, or—or an arm or a leg, I guess, but if I tried to fix your hand, I’d only make it worse.”

“I don’t care. If you fuck it up, we can just break it again until you get it right.”

Steve pales, his lips tightening like he’s trying not to throw up. _“Buck_. I won’t hurt you like that.”

“I can’t let anyone else touch me,” Bucky snaps, not far from puking himself from the pulsing waves of fear and the fractional shifting of his mangled bones. “So either you do it or it stays broken forever.” He thinks dully of his naive, pathetic desire to be _good_ to Steve. To be the friend he had before, take care of him a little in return for all he’s done. But they were making him talk about—they wanted to make him lay on a table while some white-coated stranger puts hands on him and logs their little fucking _notes_ —

Bucky drops his head for a moment. It’s not _fair_.

Steve still hasn’t answered, frowning and afraid, and Bucky would feel sorry for what he’s done if he weren’t stressed sick, hurting and sweating and so _afraid_. Finally, Steve shakes his head, still pale and useless, and he backs out of the room. For a second, Bucky thinks he really is going to go be sick, but his footsteps continue past the bathroom and toward the living room.

Toward Sam.

The two of them combined, Captain America and the Falcon, they could overpower him, especially since his right arm’s now deadweight. Could hold him down long enough to get a tranq in his blood or just tie him down, and then leave him at the mercy of whoever they’re stupid and careless enough to trust. They could force himself into a hospital. They’d say it was for his own good. They’d probably hold him down and order him to be _still_ while he’s being torn apart, telling him that they’re right there while he’s biting through his tongue to choke back his screams.

They might even leave him there. All he’s done since he came here is argue and cause problems like this and not be Steve’s Bucky. They could decide he’s too much of a mess to keep cleaning up and just...walk away. Whatever secret government doctors they see would be glad to have a super soldier to experiment on. Draw all his blood to recreate the serum Zola forced in him, dismantle his still functional arm to copy the tech inside, cut off parts to see what regenerates and what’s gone forever, burn his flesh and freeze it and take away his water or his food and just _watch,_ just _record_ his body as it falls apart until they decide they’ve observed enough of his death throes and revive him just to try it all over again, and—

“Bucky.”

It’s Sam’s voice. He’s in the doorway with Steve and they’re going to take him, to _force_ him, and Bucky cradles his hand against his chest as he pivots to charge, to kick and bite and whatever else it takes to keep them away. But the pain blazes up as he moves, as immediate and sharp as a gunshot, and bullets never stopped the Soldier but the Soldier never spent this many hours this mangled. Or if he did, Bucky can’t remember. He finds himself actually longing for the chair now; at least if HYDRA were here to zap his brains into mush, he’d be too dazed to feel the bones shifting in his hand like a sack of marbles.

It’s all Bucky can do not to drop to his knees. His stomach tenses and spasms, but nothing comes up.

“Hey,” Sam says. He hasn’t moved from the door, and his hand is on Steve’s arm, probably to stop Steve from rushing over and touching Bucky, making the pain that much worse. “Bucky. Listen, I work for the VA, okay? They provide medical services.”

“No!” Bucky takes a step back and nearly loses his footing in the process. He’s lightheaded, his heart pounding in his ears. “I won’t go. I won’t let some doctor cut me up.”

“I’m not asking you to.” Sam still hasn’t moved. Maybe he thinks that makes him less threatening, even though he’s blocking the only way out. “Steve’s willing to try setting your hand, if you let us take you somewhere with proper equipment. Okay? No one else will be there. Nobody’s gonna touch you. But we can’t perform amateur orthopedic surgery in Steve’s kitchen.”

Bucky doesn’t see why they can’t. It’s not like he can get sepsis.

“I’ll do it, Buck.” Steve’s voice is stiff, his face chalky. It’s not _fair_ for him to be so upset and worried when it’s Bucky’s hand and Bucky’s body that they want to offer up to any stranger with a medical license. “But it can’t be here. It has to be some place where we can get help if something goes really wrong. No one will hurt you, I promise. Can you trust me?”

Bucky’s eyes sting. He forces them to stay wide and unblinking until the feeling passes. Steve’s an idiot. Steve trusted SHIELD, and they were HYDRA. He trusts doctors and can’t see that they’re butchering sadists. But Steve is the only safe thing in Bucky’s life, and he’ll never let this go.

“Okay,” he mutters. Relief visibly floods through Steve while Bucky stays as stiff as ever.

They have to stand on either side of him and help him into Sam’s car, supporting his arm to keep the shifting minimal, but progress is still slow. They can’t completely stop his hand from shifting with each step, so sharp pains continue shooting up his arm. Now that he’s got a goal to work towards that’s not risking him ending up in a HYDRA medbay, he’s able to focus through the distress tugging at the corners of his mind at the grotesque mess he’s made of his hand.   
  
“I can probably get you in a wheelchair once we’re there, that’ll help us move you with less pain.” Sam must have been good at his job, Bucky thinks, both in medical rescue and therapy. He’s all business when he figures out a plan, and he explains everything he’s going to do before he does it. “I’ll have to get you in a back entrance, though, if it’s gonna mess with you to see doctors at work. Or for them to see you.”

Bucky wants to snap that he’s not some scared kid, but he bites his tongue. He wouldn’t _cry_ at the sight of doctors—the Soldier never did—but when there’s this much pain clouding his head, he might attack or threaten them. Even if he held back, he can’t be seen. He’d end up in a cell at _best_ if anyone else knew about him. He doesn’t want to think about what would happen to Steve for sheltering him.

When they slip inside and Sam turns on the x-ray unit, there’s a low, electrical hum. There are no sparks, no overwhelming odor of burning ozone. The faint drone of the machinery is nothing like the chair. But Bucky stills feels weak hearing it, his vision swimming and briefly black at the edges. If not for the wheelchair Steve insisted Bucky sit in despite his protests, he’d collapse on the floor.

Bucky starts to clench his metal hand around the armrest of the wheelchair, to brace himself for what’s coming, but he can’t. He’d break the chair beyond fixing and raise too many questions.

He forces his breathing to slow and tries to will his heartbeat into steadying. He doesn’t close his eyes. It’s better to know what’s coming. He can’t let anything catch him off guard. He can’t risk snapping and hurting Steve.

His bones appear on the computer screen when Steve guides his hand in front of the unit. It’s even worse on the inside, crooked and shattered and unnatural, _wrong._ Bucky’s stomach lurches.

Sam can’t keep himself from tensing at the picture either, and despite his best efforts, Bucky’s heart rate skyrockets. Sam’s supposed to be the one who knows that he’s doing. He’s not supposed to flinch like that.

Even the worst medics in HYDRA, the ones who complained the whole time or left halfway through procedures, they never had that look. Disgust and something else Bucky can’t name. He can’t deal with the unfamiliar now. It’s hard enough keeping it together as is, and Bucky feels an instant, burning rage at Sam for making all of this that much worse.

“Okay,” Sam says. There’s a pause. “You—your accelerated healing means some of the bones have already fixed themselves, but in the wrong position. So—Steve’s going to have to break them to set them right.”

Bucky hadn’t thought Steve could get any paler. His mouth goes so thin it almost disappears. When he swallows, it looks like it catches in his throat. He’s likely trying to hide his emotions, thinking it’ll help Bucky to stay calm. But it just looks like he’s dying.

Bucky doesn’t know what’s happening then. His vision starts to go white, visual static closing in over Steve’s distressed face, and his ears are ringing. He’s almost dizzy, and he’s not really sure if he’s breathing or not. He’s vaguely aware that Sam’s still saying things and he tries to make himself get it together and focus like he used to do as the Soldier, but he can’t anymore, he somehow just can’t. It’s all too much and the x-ray noise is still mingling with the chair in his mind and he keeps expecting lightning behind his eyes and it never comes and that makes it _worse_. He wants to ask what’s wrong with him but he can’t speak and all he’s aware of, through the waves of visual static, is that Sam and Steve keep _looking_ at him like that.

Something’s not right in his stomach. He thinks he might retch, but he doesn’t. It takes him a moment to realize that what’s actually happening is much worse. All the warmth seems to have left his body but it’s actually just rushed _down_. It happened sometimes during the worst operations when he was the Soldier, but there’s no reason for him to piss himself when it’s just his stupid _hand_ getting worked on.

But he has. His body just stopped holding on and now hot trickles are worming their way between his thighs, rapidly growing cold in the trail they leave. The paper of the examination table grows soggy and warm under his ass. When he starts to hear it dripping down onto the floor, he can’t help shutting his eyes. He can’t bear to see Steve’s or Sam’s faces right now. He wishes he’d just died on the helicarrier rather than deal with whatever’s coming next.

Then Steve’s hand is on his back, warm and steady as a contrast to the sickly chill that’s settled through him. Heat is still coursing down his legs and it must be pooling under Steve’s feet now but the hand doesn’t pull away. And finally, blessedly, the x-ray machine falls silent. The threat of lighting and ozone fades, and Steve’s voice comes back into focus.

“—all right, Bucky, really, don’t worry about it. It has been such a rough day. You’ve been under a lot of stress. No judgment here, we know it’s been rough. Come on, can you pull out of it for me?”

Bucky manages to unfreeze his muscles, though he can’t bring himself to look Steve fully in the eyes. As his vision comes back online he makes himself look away into the corner, where the ceiling meets the wall. 

“Hey there, Buck. You with me now?”

He doesn’t know if he can speak or what the hell he’d say, but he manages a fractional nod. The flood between his thighs finally begins to taper out. Heat rushes to his face and he stares determinedly at the corner.

The hand stays with him, slowly rubbing up and down his spine. It centers him, at least. He can breathe, the noise jagged and startling in the silence left behind by the absence of the x-ray.

“Sam’s gone to find you some scrub pants or something you can wear. We’ll get you fixed up, don’t you worry. We’ll get you through this.”

“You’re not mad at me?” Bucky winces at how small and childlike he sounds. But they’ve been consistently trying to help him, and all he’s done is be fucked up and difficult with them. He can’t help being afraid and ashamed. 

“Oh, _Buck_.” Steve’s voice is so soft and sad in his ear. “My _God_. _No_. We know you’ve been through hell.”

“When they worked on me.” He didn’t realize he was going to say it until the words pass through his lips. He tries to stop the humiliating truth from coming out, but whatever’s inside him that’s been holding things back seems to have numbed and he can’t make it work again. “I’d be awake. And I got pretty used to it, but sometimes, when the operation was really bad, or long, or just—gross—and they hated me for it. Because I wasn’t supposed to be human like that. It wasn’t—and then, if it got out to whatever team I was working with, if the medics complained. The Soldier was supposed supposed to be this—I mean, I couldn’t fucking get them to _listen_ to me. They wouldn’t take me seriously. It happened a—a few times, I guess.”

His eyes have stayed fixed on the corner, but Steve’s in his line of sight now, anyway. That’s because Steve’s moved in front of him, and he’s—

He’s pressing a long kiss to Bucky’s forehead. And he doesn’t say anything else, but he stays close and he’s warm and he doesn’t say a word about the puddle he’s standing in or how Bucky smells like piss. Bucky finally lets himself lean in as much as his hurting arm will allow. He’s shivering from fear and the aftermath of his panic attack, his wet pants clinging uncomfortably and his entire ass feeling chilly and gross. His right hand is still a jagged array of lightning bolt pains around which he’s trapped in off-kilter revolution, but Steve’s warmth is a lifeline. 

When Sam finally comes back, Bucky’s not sure which is greater, his relief or his embarrassment. At least Sam’s demeanor is composed again, and he looks Bucky in the eyes without a trace of annoyance. “We’ll try to get you cleaned up without moving that arm too much, but this’ll work best if you let Steve or me help you. Can you do that?”

It’s not like he has a choice, so he nods with his face flushed. Thankfully, it’s Steve who helps him step out of his soggy sweats and underpants while Sam wipes down the exam table and mops up his piss from the floor. It occurs to Bucky that he doesn’t know how the hell he’ll ever thank Sam for all this. There probably isn’t a specific bouquet at the florist’s for this kind of thing.

Bucky is—thank fuck—able to clean his own groin with the baby wipes Sam brought him, but he can’t reach around or down without jarring his hand, so Steve has to wipe up his ass and the insides of his legs. It’s a small mercy that Bucky can’t see his face when he’s back there, and his hands are gentler than the techs ever were. He guides Bucky to step into the oversized green scrubs and pulls them up for him, then helps him back onto the freshly cleaned table. There’s no way for the process to be anything but humiliating, but they make it quick, at least.

“Okay,” Sam says briskly. He’s a true professional, moving on like he’s not currently holding Bucky’s urine-stained clothes in a bag. “We’re going to get this done as quickly as possible. Bucky, just let us know when you’re ready and I’ll instruct Steve, all right?”

“Let’s just get it over with,” Bucky mutters to his violently green lap. “I can get through.”

“I’m sure you _can_ , but we want to make this as non-traumatic as possible. You need a break, water, anything, you say something. You call it.”

Non-traumatic. Bucky’s pretty sure that ship has sailed. He thinks he sees what Sam’s trying to do, though—the HYDRA techs never asked if he was ready to be worked on before they began. No matter what he’s done, they are determined to grant that autonomy, even if Bucky has no idea what to do with it. “Yeah, okay. Go.”

Sam takes a long stare at the x-ray. “We should start at your wrist and work up,” he says, sounding like he’s trying to sound sure. “If we set your fingers first, it might jar them back out of place working on everything below them.”

“Fine.” Bucky just wants it _done_. He’s trying not to see his hand or the splintered bones on screen or the bag of his piss-soaked clothes and he’s running out of places to look. And Steve’s not helping with that sickly color his face has gone again. He can’t even disguise his sad eyes. It still makes Bucky want to shout, even after Steve’s just shrugged off what was once an unforgivable weakness.

“Steve.” Sam must also have noticed that Steve’s on the edge of passing out. “You got this?”

“I just…” Steve’s jaw tenses. “I hate the thought of hurting him. After all he’s gone through on operating tables and—”

“Please,” Bucky mutters. It’s pathetic, but he’s already been pathetic over and over again today and Steve still hasn’t gotten sick of him. And his hand _hurts_ and the x-ray’s still humming and he just wants it _over_.

Bucky ducks his head down, letting his hair fall in front of his face. He can’t bear to see the looks on their faces. He can’t imagine, even with everything else they’ve let slide, that they’re not judging the desperation in his voice.

“We’re making this a better experience for him now,” Sam says finally. Bucky can’t see his face, but he can’t discern any judgment in his voice. “Or at least, we can. But not if we let the pain go on like this. So we need to get to it.”

Steve’s hands wrap around his wrist. Pain flares, but Bucky’s still. His breath hitches and that’s it. With HYDRA, his body would be wound up tighter than any restraints they might have deigned to use. There was always a low thrum in the back of his mind, an electricity all its own that wasn’t quite fear, not after decades. More than anything, it was a looming, terrible knowledge of the punishment that awaited if he failed. And with it, the certainty that, eventually, he would.

But this is Steve. Steve’s let him be angry and weak and contemptibly pitiful, and he’s still here. Bucky’s knees feel weak, but not with pain.

“Bucky?” Steve’s voice is high, concerned. “Are you all right? Can you do this?”

“Yeah,” Bucky says. And then—he nods. He _moves_ , only his head and far from the part of him being worked on, but he moves. HYDRA never would have allowed it, wouldn’t have asked him in the first place. And Steve, Steve just looks relieved. It’s dizzying.

“Okay. You let me know if that changes. I’m going to move your wrist again, this way. Okay?”

Steve indicates direction by moving his own head, and tension Bucky didn’t realize he was holding seeps out of his shoulders. No one has ever explained what’s coming before. Why bother to tell a weapon the reason you’re stripping it down?

Bucky wonders if this is how things were in the war. If Steve was so patient before Bucky spent a lifetime in captivity. But even if this is an act, a gentle front Steve’s putting on out of pity or even fear that the Winter Soldier will go on the attack if he feels too threatened, it doesn’t matter. It’s soothing, _mending_ something in him that the medics never touched. It drowns out the pain, even as Steve’s snapping bones.

His bones are loud and vaguely wet inside his flesh, like stepping on a fallen branch some time after rain. Bucky doesn’t look at his hand as Steve works, and for a second he wonders if Steve’s tearing out his fingernails, because Sam keeps flinching as if something’s being thrown his way.

But judging by the shifting streaks of pain in his wrist bones, Steve’s nowhere near his fingertips yet. Sam’s just disgusted. Steve had looked disgusted too, though mostly just sad, when he was staring at Bucky’s hand before he started. This ought to be revolting, feeling his hand break again and again as easily as a toothpick, but even if the Soldier hadn’t worked in blood and viscera like an artist might work in oils, he had never been allowed to be disgusted at the damage to his body. Repulsion led all too easily to vomiting, flinching, crying. None of that was ever permitted.

And none of it wells up under the surface of his skin now as it used to. He doesn’t have to force his eyes open to try and dry tears pooling at the corners. Steve’s broken his hand at least a dozen times in the last few minutes and all Bucky can feel is calm and relief, his body slackening more and more as the pain grows and ebbs. He feels grounded. Trusting. Safe.

Bucky can feel Sam’s eyes on him and he knows that ought to send him in a tailspin of concern. Anyone who used to stare at him like that was undoubtedly cataloging either weakness or transgression. But Steve’s already threatened to kill anyone who even thinks of harming Bucky, and Steve has him now, and Bucky can’t bring himself to care about anything else.

*

The Soldier’s teeth grind against each other. The noise it makes in his skull is ugly and almost loud enough to drown out the voices of the technicians. But nothing blocks him from feeling hands on his body, pushing and pulling, studying. Even if he lowers his gaze, he can still feel their eyes dissecting him.

Not literally dissecting, not today. But the techs aren’t finished with the examination yet, so that could still be coming.

The Soldier doesn’t know what he’s done to warrant this. He’s gathered, from the fragments of conversation overheard between his handlers and the techs, that his behavior is erratic. He requires maintenance more frequently than is standard. They are studying him to find out why.

If he could just tell them, all of this touching and prying could be avoided. But the Soldier doesn’t remember being erratic. The maintenance prevents him from self-reporting any symptoms.

There’s a light in his eyes all at once, so strong that all he can see now is the veins of his own eye winding through the blinding white glare. The Soldier does not flinch. He does not blink. He’s already misbehaved in some unspecified way he can’t remember, before he was thawed this time, and punishment or surgery or both are likely already on the table. He will not add to the tally against him by as much as moving, even if the light is too much and burns his eye and brings to mind the chair.

The light is gone. The Soldier hears a pen scratching against paper. He is still blind, though the white has become purple in its afterimage.

His breathing is steady. His body, motionless, save for when the techs take hold of him to manipulate like a marionette. But the Soldier’s heart hammers in his chest, and though he knows that this could affect the readings that they’re taking, he cannot make it still. He cannot loosen his shoulders or back either, and approximately every ten minutes, his prosthetic tenses and whirs despite his efforts to control it.

Nothing has hurt. He has been through similar examinations literally more than he can remember. The Soldier is still partially clothed, at least for now, and the techs give no indication that they plan to change that. There has been no mention of surgery or internal probing.

Yet his heart won’t _stop._

He has found himself increasingly unable to focus and he realizes that a female voice is saying something. He should have been paying attention, if he wanted to know what’s coming, what they think might be wrong with him. She’s coming back into view as the blinding afterimage from the light fades away, in patches—a flash of glossy dark hair pulled tightly back, the bright white of a lab coat and the name tag lying against it, the striking slash of dark prominent lipstick as she speaks intently to his inspectors.

He hasn’t processed the name written on her tag. He’s fairly sure he’s had a rotating array of technicians over the years, as he has worked with a number of handlers, commanders, programmers, and trainers. Unless they’re particularly important or around for repeat missions, he’s fairly sure that names are not something they bother to let him keep. He wonders briefly if this could potentially result in losses in intel down the line, but it isn’t his place to question HYDRA’s tactics, so he quickly turns from that line of thinking. He focuses instead on the lipstick.

He finds it strangely fascinating. Most of the medics don’t bother with any sort of makeup that he can tell, and in spite of himself he experiences a prick of curiosity. There’s something fascinating about the bold line of color in her face or the emphasis it seems to lend the speech the Soldier can’t seem to focus on. He thinks, suddenly, that he’s sure there are other slashes of lipstick hovering faintly around his memory and that these are important somehow. He can’t think why he’d find lipstick important but something is stirring in his chest that compels him to think harder. Vague colors hover frustratingly on the edge of his consciousness, and he thinks he can potentially grasp the brightest, boldest red, like winter berries standing out against an expanse of snow. His chest tightens and his heartbeat quickens further still, chastening him and bringing him out of his trance.

He doesn’t understand why he possesses such strong feelings in response to the maybe-red, but it is not his place to _feel_. He’s already erratic, and if these memories have been taken from him, then there is a _reason_ he doesn’t need them. Pursuing old memories and feelings will only further compromise his function.

His eyes are more or less working again, and he can see the woman when she instructs another member of the med team. That man is holding a handful of wires and electrodes, so he supposes the techs must need to understand what’s happening inside his head. They use electrodes when he’s in the chair, sometimes, to measure where and what they’re wiping away. He’s not in the chair now, but he still has to keep himself from flinching as the man begins dabbing at his forehead with sterile wipes.

He’s not usually ashamed of flinching at the chair. That pain no one has ever mocked, and he knows damn well from his observations of himself and others in the field that no one could withstand the chair in silence. He finds himself lowering his eyes at this, though. The chair isn’t even _here_. What is this _weakness_?

He hopes he’s not degenerating. How long has he been operational? He thinks he is the only one of what he is, so there’s no basis for comparison on how long he can maintain peak condition—and then what? Can they even fix whatever is happening to him?

The only chance for that is if he cooperates with the techs. He resolves to stop this questioning and tries to will his heart to slow as the male tech begins adhering the electrodes in place. He feels perspiration beading at his hairline and bites his tongue as if that can stop him sweating.

The technician places the last of the electrodes and steps back. There are no further touches, not for the moment. The Soldier doesn’t have words for what he feels. Maybe the chair has taken the vocabulary, or maybe it’s some aberration specific to him. He should feel relief—any contact of electrodes that is not followed by pain is reason for respite, as is any touch that does not linger or lower—and he does, but there’s something _empty_. There’s a gaping _nothingness_ , not just in his head but all throughout him.

It makes no sense. The Soldier’s body has responded normally to every test so far. And when he tests himself, he remembers all the things he’s meant to remember: how to strip, clean, and load any firearm, how to calculate a shot at great distance in high wind, thousands of ways to incapacitate a target, how fast a body will bleed out depending on which artery is severed.

The Soldier is as whole as he’s ever permitted to be, so what’s missing? 

In his limited memory of personal experiences, the Soldier has never considered being irreparably broken. He wonders now, if he is. He wonders what they will do with him in that case, if he will be put down or into storage indefinitely or drained of blood so HYDRA can use his remnants to build a better soldier. Each option ultimately leads to oblivion, and despite the hollowness inside him, the Soldier feels something akin to comfort at the thought.

Even more than the emptiness, that feeling makes the Soldier certain he is critically malfunctioning.

“Good,” says the woman with the lipstick. She is writing something down. The Soldier has been in his head again, missing what the techs around him have been saying. “Now we’ll need the heart rate, pulse on the right wrist—”

She continues speaking, but the Soldier doesn’t hear anything further. They want to measure his pulse, and even though his chest feels as empty as the rest of him, his heart is still pounding. He struggles yet again to steady it, but then multiple hands are on him, pulling off the electrodes on his head and adding others to his chest, his arm, and even the scarred, shiny skin where his flesh melts into metal.

The Soldier feels his face flush. The rush of blood upward does nothing to still his heart. The emptiness is flooding out as if the technicians have gutted him. Shame rushes in to fill the void. His racing heart. His ugly, pitted skin alongside flawless, gleaming steel. The sound of grinding tooth enamel drowning out the pulse in his ears. He is failing in every way save for keeping still, and then there are hands on his lower back, his abdomen, the cold press of adhesive pads contrasted with the warmth of human touch, and his body doesn’t know how to interpret the sensation and the grinding in his jaw gives way to a growl, his own hands moving to knock the technicians’ away. He hadn’t realized he’d started to lunge until he freezes upright on the table.

The room falls silent. The Soldier’s heart is now so loud he thinks the technicians must hear it too.

They’re talking in low voices now. He can’t bring himself to lie down on the table. He isn’t sure if or how he’ll be punished for this disobedience.

“—have to finish examinations to get him cleared—”

“—Do you want to be the one to go near—”

“—fact is, you’re expendable, he’s not. You knew that when you—”

“—should just get the Secretary down here to—”

His master. They want to get his master to assess the level of his disobedience. That’s a name and a face he does remember, and a set of calculating eyes he does not want to disappoint. He waits, rigid and staring.

“We don’t have time for that. He’s still in that meeting for SHIELD. Obviously, we can’t risk bringing this to _their_ attention.” The woman in the lipstick is the only one who doesn’t look somewhat rattled. “Let’s get this done and we’ll determine whether we need to wipe him again.”

Wipe him again. Maybe that’ll help. He still doesn’t know why he’s required it so much lately, but he’s shaky and nauseous and he doesn’t know why. Something about the hands that were working their way down his abdomen. They’ve made no move to lower the waistband of the loose undergarment they keep him in when they freeze him in the cryo unit. Thinking about their hands makes his breath catch and he becomes aware that his heart is still hammering away. He doesn’t understand what’s wrong with him. Maybe this really is the end. Or maybe another wipe will fix him, if they figure out what the previous wipes have failed to achieve. He makes himself stay still as the techs carefully position the remaining electrodes. He makes sure to watch everything they’re doing so as to be able to brace for the touch, aware of their eyes cautiously tracking what he does.

He doesn’t get sick. He knows that he can’t. But something feels very sick, somehow, flushed under the skin and nauseating and _wrong_ when he thinks about what he expected—for the techs to strip his pants off and—something. Something stirs deep within him and he forces himself to stop thinking about that too. If he passes this exam, he’ll receive another mission briefing—some loose end that needs taking care of before he goes back to cryo.

“His heart rate is elevated, but the brain scans don’t show anything seriously off.” Under her direction, one of the techs lifts his right arm. The Soldier doesn’t exist, his vision oddly sharp as he watches electrode wires move and sway. His metal arm is carefully moved in a similar way. His pulse is counted again, and then the woman says, “All right. We’re on a tight timeframe, and I don’t think it’s worth it to wipe him. It’s not worth the chance he’ll still be in recovery mode when they need him. It takes time for cognitive and musculature function to come fully online when they’re done. He’ll hold up for now—” she gives him a sharp, piercing look that lets him know this is as much an order as anything the Secretary tells him to do, “— and we’ll run more extensive cognitive testing to recalibrate the wipe when he comes back.”

The veins in right arm are taut, prominent, as they always are when he thaws and is subject to blood draws and IVs and everything else needed to restore him to functioning. Looking at his arm, still held out before him in the technician’s grasp, it almost seems as if the wires connected to the electrodes pass through his skin and merge into the blood vessels beneath. Then the technician tilts his arm just slightly, the wires drooping. The Soldier half-expects blood to pour out, but of course nothing does.

He’s as much machine as flesh, if not more. Machine in every way that counts, save for this latest irregularity swirling in his mind like a parasite tunneling in. But the next wipe will fix that. It has to. The Soldier is not allowed to fail, not in the field and certainly not now, when he’s doing nothing more than feeling pointlessly, stupidly _sick_ at nothing more than sitting here letting his body be manipulated, as it has been more times than he can remember.

His arm is moved again. The wires stretch, and the Soldier is almost sure that he feels a corresponding pull in his arm. Maybe there are no veins below his skin. The human body is fragile and bound by limitations, weaknesses that HYDRA has no room for. Maybe they’ve grown tired of his human parts, and last time he was under, maybe they cut him open and scraped them all out, like dogs stripping the last scrap of meat from a bone.

That would explain why he feels so _broken_ ; whenever his prosthetic is upgraded or he is given a new weapon, there is always a learning curve. The Soldier hopes that this one will pass quickly. He cannot serve his required functions when his skin is crawling and he can feel the wiry veins writhing underneath. He can scarcely breathe like this.

The technician tears one of the electrodes away, severing it from the vein beneath in one bloodless tug. There is no wound. There wouldn’t be; HYDRA would not upgrade the Soldier in a manner that allowed for such easy injury. The other wires sway at the motion and that rocking, nauseating sensation ripples up the Soldier’s arm and throughout his body. The technician still has hold of him, still guiding his arm by the veins. They are no longer looking at his body, but at the screens around them, taking in the measurements his newly electric blood has provided.

The Soldier wonders if one day, he will be nothing more than those screens, as Zola became. He wonders when the technicians will remove his skin. It is still human, thin and easily broken. It sends those stabbing feelings of revulsion and fear and emotions he cannot name shooting down his spine with every touch.

The Soldier looks away from the hand at his wrist. He stares down at nothing and imagines some future point when they will peel back his skin and let him step out of it, cut away from any last human failings. He feels another sickening tug at his veins and imagines the day when he will feel nothing at all.

One by one the inner and outer vein webbings become disconnected. No, what is he thinking? The electrodes and wires were not veins, and there’s no reason for his heart to contract so violently as he watches them sway and swing from the technician’s hand. They bring standard mission garments to him; a tighter, more field-appropriate undergarment and his black pants and undershirt. He dresses himself while they write notes on the tests they may need to run when he returns. He looks only at the ground as he strips and re-dresses, trying to shake off whatever had come over him.

Relief comes unexpectedly in the form of the cover of his undershirt and the zipping and buttoning of his pants. He flashes back to when he’d nearly attacked the techs, his body compelled to lunge and lash out at the sensation of hands and devices moving down his torso. He’d expected them to remove the pants, and then—and then what? 

Like with the lipstick, something looming and familiar and somehow much bigger than himself looms in the back of his mind at the thought. Like with the lipstick, he refuses to probe at it, curious and afraid. He thinks a thought that can stir him so tremendously could cause a dangerous and devastating malfunction. They’ll figure out how to recalibrate the chair, and they’ll take it away. It’ll hurt, but then it’ll be better. And anyway, he’s allowed to make noise in the chair. For now, he can be relieved that he did not have to endure whatever it was he thought they were going to do.

The lead tech, the woman with the lipstick, is not ginger and afraid with him when she hands him the jacket and tactical vest, not like the other techs he nearly attacked. He’s not sure why that makes him more agitated.

He wonders, suddenly—and this is the worst thought of all, and he’d certainly be punished if they knew he was thinking this—how he came to be with these people, if the things they do make him so afraid. There are missions where his skills are praised with something near reverence but the ratio of that to medical procedures and punishments and cryofreeze is—

No. It’s all necessary. Something’s wrong with him, his heartbeat is harder and worse, he shouldn’t let himself think about these things. It’s clearly not conducive to efficient functioning. But the thoughts keep rolling in.

When did he get here? And if HYDRA is to replace his parts with machine, then was he once human? How was he chosen to be the Asset? And when he was first becoming the Asset, did he know how little reward and glory it would be compared to this?

He knows it’s disloyal, but he can’t squash down the quiet thought that follows: if he had known, would he have still gone through with this?

He pushes his feet into the boots they provide. Sturdy, but worn at the toes and scuffed, the laces a little bit frayed. He must have worn them many times before. As he tightens the laces and begins to tie them up, he finally reaches the thought that’s been circling his head, elusive, the one that’s sowing the shame and discomfort that causes his insides to knot.

If he is the legendary and feared Winter Soldier, then why is he so _helpless?_

His cheeks feel hot with shame, and fear as well at the thought of what the punishment might be if they knew he was thinking that his role is anything but a duty and an honor. He’d better not allow his erratic thoughts to compromise mission efficacy. If he gets through this mission, they’ll recalibrate the wipe. He’ll cooperate this time, he’ll make himself do it, and they’ll take all these errant and unhelpful thoughts away.

He’s still combatting weighty reluctance, his boots feeling heavier than usual on his feet, as he allows the lipsticked technician to lead him out of the examination chamber and on to his mission briefing.

*

Once they crept out of the clinic through the back, Sam looking ahead to make sure there was no one to see them and Steve carrying a bag full of piss-soaked clothes that Bucky couldn’t help but stare at no matter how badly he didn’t want to, he had thought that would be the end of it. His hand was set. As long as he didn’t flip out again and break it a second time, everything was fine. They were done.

They weren’t, of course.

Sam insisted on coming over to check that Bucky was healing all right, day after day. And because he didn’t want Bucky moving his hand around and threatening the newly mending bones, that meant guiding Steve through carefully stroking his fingers down Bucky’s, gently pressing to make sure everything felt like it was in place.

Bucky hadn’t wanted to admit how much he loved when Steve did it. How calm and safeguarded and _kept_ he felt. He’s supposed to be trying to be a person again—a normal, well-functioning grown man who somehow repays Steve for everything Steve has done for him. He’s not supposed to want this—to be looked after. _Maintained_. Like with HYDRA. But when it’s Steve, it feels so much more _right_ than anything HYDRA ever did. He knows Steve will never do anything to hurt him, and he’d never send him out on missions to intercept information he doesn’t understand, or to kill innocents. When Steve says he wants to help Bucky be better, he really _means_ that.

So he’s sort of sorry when Sam pronounces his hand fully healed, because that means there’s no reason for Steve to keep touching and examining him like that. To keep on looking at him like he just wants to take every part of him and make it cared-for and whole.

Bucky looks up and Sam meets his gaze as Steve is letting go of his hand. Sam’s been watching him—intently, just like he was watching as Steve fixed him up. Bucky still feels unsettled by how Sam watches.

He frowns at Bucky’s hand, then back at Bucky himself, and then at Steve. His brow furrows a little, and he takes a deep breath. “All right. Now that this is all taken care of, I think there’s something else I’d like to talk to you guys about. Do you have the time to do that right now?”

Bucky doesn’t like that at all. Last time Sam had wanted to talk, it was about examining his arm and look how that had gone. And Sam looks like he knows that Bucky isn’t going to like what he has to say.

But Steve, damn him, says “Sure, Sam,” after a quick, worried glance at Bucky. He always wants Sam’s advice. He never knows what to do with Bucky. Hell, Bucky doesn’t know what to do with Bucky, so why would anyone else? He desperately wants to help, and Bucky’s put him through pacing, fretting anxiety these past several days as he kept an eye on the healing process of what Bucky had done to his own hand.

So, fine, he’ll listen. But,

“I’m still not going to a doctor,” he says flatly. He’s sorry to be so rude—part of him knows Sam’s only trying to help them both—but at this point they both have to know that he just _can’t_. If he freaks out that bad again, he could actually kill someone, and that’s _if_ his doc doesn’t turn out to be a HYDRA plant.

“Yeah, that’s part of what I wanted to talk to you about,” Sam says, meeting his gaze. “I don’t think you can cope with a professional medical examination at this point in time. Would you disagree with that?” He looks Bucky in the eyes like he doesn’t think Bucky’s a paranoid loose cannon, even though Bucky knows that’s basically what he’s asking.

He lowers his eyes a little, but tells Sam, “That’s true.” His voice comes out softer and smaller than he intends.

“Okay,” Sam says patiently. “Well. I still recommend therapy in some capacity, and I can look into that for you. While you may not be ready to go right now, I really think you’re dealing with some things that need to be addressed in a professional environment. And friends can’t be therapists, and therapists can’t be friends. That’s like, _the_ major rule of working in mental health services. We both know Steve’s great, but I think there are some things he can’t work you through. And I’m going to bring this up again, but I want you to think about that for me, all right?”

Bucky doesn’t want to, but he nods just to make Steve stop looking so damn worried. He’s basically made all his decisions these past few days based on trying not to stress Steve out more than he already has.

“If you happened to need medical services, I’m guessing that the Avengers could set something up for you—something that didn’t occur in a typically medical setting, if you were able to set it up beforehand. I’m guessing it’s not regular doctors who take care of Steve.”

Steve ducks his head a little. “Actually, I—I haven’t been to a doctor since I thawed out. I figured the serum—other people probably needed it more. Except for right after the helicarrier. I was in the hospital for a bit then.”

This time Steve’s the one Sam’s pinning with his stare. “I hope I never find out about some third super—soldier buddy of yours named—I don’t know, what are old people named? Alfred. Harold. Something like that. I am not taking on a third one of you, y’all are going to give me heart failure. We are going to set up some kind of medical assistance for the pair of you, and you’re going to get your injuries checked after missions, Steve, I’ll call you and make sure you’re doing it. Put you on the phone with my mother, you see if I don’t. We’ll work out how to make it trauma-trigger free. But that does mean,” and now his gaze is back on Bucky, “That we need to figure out a little bit about what that will look like.”

Bucky stays silent. He doesn’t know how a medical examination could possibly be made any better for him, or any less likely to have some kind of episode.

“You don’t have to get into this in detail, Bucky. But we need to think a little bit about—maybe your main experiences with doctors, and how to get you care in ways that don’t hit on those really bad experiences—triggers, they’re called, or something that brings traumatic experiences back to you.”

How to avoid medical triggers. Bucky laughs a little at that, darkly. “Better to try and think about what a doctor _hasn’t_ done to me,” he mutters. Then he flinches a little and shuts his mouth. That brings up a part of him he never wants anyone to see. Never wants to see it again himself.

But they did, didn’t they? They’ve already seen. When he panicked and broke his own hand. When he pissed himself. They can’t see what HYDRA did to him, exactly, but what they’ve made of him is very, very clear. He flushes deeply and drops his gaze to his lap, face burning. Steve’s rubbing his shoulder now, and Bucky doesn’t want to see the sad, concerned look on his face.

“When Steve took care of your hand,” Sam’s saying, almost from a distance as Bucky fights through the rising shame, “You seemed to do all right. Better than all right. You were very calm.”

Bucky huddles in further, though he’s not sure why. Somehow he feels it’s wrong to want— _that_ —from Steve. He doesn’t say anything.

“Steve is a safe person for you,” Sam continues. “You said as much right before you broke your hand, that you can’t trust people other than Steve, right? And even when he had to break your hand to set it, you were okay.”

“We—we helped each other,” Bucky blurts out. He feels like Sam’s accusing him of something and he has to fight against it. “In the war. When we got hurt.” He makes it sound like a mutual exchange, but Steve never needed Bucky’s help by the time they were overseas. He was invincible then.

“Right,” Sam says. “That’s good, that you can trust him. My point is, when Steve takes care of you, it’s safe. Have you ever heard of therapeutic roleplay, either of you?”

In the corner of his eye, Bucky sees Steve shake his head. Bucky doesn’t know what it means either, but he’s not about to admit that. He’s on edge already and he’d like to at least _pretend_ he has some control over whatever Sam’s building to.

“It’s acting out situations that make you tense or upset with a safe person,” Sam explains. “It’s not a...conventional method of therapy. But people do it, in...different contexts. And it’s not like your situation is anything typical, but Steve, when you took care of his hand, that’s the first time I’ve seen him look calm. So—if you’re comfortable with it, Bucky, then Steve could act like he’s taking care of you. The way a doctor would, so you can associate medical care with something that isn’t triggering for you.”

Bucky’s face burns. Sam wants him to _playact_ , like a little kid. He thinks Bucky’s broken and pathetic enough that Steve pressing a stethoscope to his chest will fix his fucked up brain. Bucky has to bite his lip to keep from shouting on reflex. He feels the overwhelming need to drive Sam _away_ so it’ll be just him and Steve and _safe_ again.

But Steve says, “I’ll do anything if Bucky’s okay with it,” and Bucky can _feel_ Steve looking worried at him again and his chest is shamefully, stupidly warm at the thought of still getting to feel Steve’s hands on his, soft and gentle and always asking if he’s okay, and before he can stop himself or even control his tone to keep from sounding pathetically eager, he says yes.

The first few times it’s awkward as hell. Sam’s trying to guide them through playing pretend and Bucky’s sure Steve feels as stupid as he does. If Bucky weren’t paralyzed with embarrassment through the entirety of their first “session,” then he wouldn’t have been able to stop himself from leaving. The room, the apartment, probably even the country. Bucky can _hear_ HYDRA technicians in his mind, laughing at him for indulging in such a pathetic fantasy.

Still, they keep at it, if only because talking about it once was mortifying and Bucky’s certain he’ll drop dead if he has to deal with Sam needling him about taking it back up. Slowly, it gets less awkward. Steve’s eyes are still Steve’s when Bucky finally overcomes his shame enough to look at him. Steve’s hands are soft when he touches Bucky’s body, even if he’s touching the cold, hard prosthetic. He always asks permission, both before touching Bucky or moving him. When his fingers glide over the metal plates, they don’t shift or grind the way they used to for the technicians. When he asks Bucky to relax his arm, the plates just slide open with an ease Bucky can’t remember ever seeing before. Eventually, Steve’s soft questions—“Is this all right, Buck? Does that feel okay?” drown out the laughter in his head.

He finally lets Steve look into his metal arm, shining in light and pressing delicately inside, and nothing hurts. It isn’t until Sam breaks the silence that Bucky even remembers they’re not alone.

“Bucky? Hey, Bucky?”

“What?” Bucky’s voice sounds too sharp, too loud, and the room is too big and bright for what felt so intimate just a second ago. But Steve is still _inside_ his arm, with his other hand stroking at the metal as if Steve doesn’t think of it as any different from his flesh, and even now whatever spell the moment held isn’t completely dissipated.

“We’ve been here for over an hour,” Sam says. “I was gonna ask if you wanted to stop for the day. But you look comfortable, so ignore me.”

“Can we…” Bucky’s a little embarrassed to ask, but his embarrassment is far outweighed by the amazement that he has been calm in Steve’s hands for over an hour already. He can’t remember the last time he felt this...this _nice_. “Steve. Could you keep going?” He can feel his face heat a little. “Just a little longer?” 

“Sure thing, Buck.” Steve sounds so earnest. He doesn’t look tired at all. Sam’s talked about getting them some real doctors’ tools to work with and maybe a white coat if Bucky’s comfortable with it. Bucky had found it a little ridiculous at the time, but now it’s almost embarrassing how fascinated he is by the idea of having Steve look him over like that.

“It’s just…” he finds himself saying. “When they worked on my arm, they didn’t really treat it like...they didn’t treat anything about me like a human being. But at least they realized my body could feel.” Usually, anyway.

He hadn’t meant to say all that, but he doesn’t feel as upset as he usually would. Steve’s got him. Sam’s supervising. And before every session Sam makes sure to tell him this visit is totally confidential. Whatever they’ve created here, Sam and Steve are as much a part of it as he is now. So he manages to glance at Steve rather than curling up into a tiny ball. 

“Did they not realize your arm could feel?” Sam says, a little sharp. Bucky flinches a bit. “Sorry. It’s all right. It _can_ feel, I’m guessing?”

“Yes,” Bucky self-reports, regaining control of himself.

“Hey—hey, wait, Bucky. I’ve noticed you always take the same tone when you’re responding back to us. You went back to it, just now. You know you _can_ say more, right?”

Bucky’s squeezing his eyes closed before he even thinks about it. No, no, that’s _wrong_ , he’ll mess it up if he—

“All right, hey, hey. You don’t have to. Was that something else they had you do with HYDRA?”

“Yes,” Bucky says again automatically, and now he hears it. He speaks minimally, in a flat tone. Only affirmatives or negatives unless he is asked to say more. “Moving or talking just got in the way.”

“Well, it won’t here,” Sam says firmly. “I think we have a lot to work on, still, with your arm and with that aspect of your treatment, as well. We’ll let you know if we need you still, Bucky. For now, just keep that one arm still for Steve, all right?”

Bucky nods. He _nods_ , like he did when Steve was working on his hand, and he isn’t punished or forcibly stilled with restraints. Because of course he’s not. He’s human and safe and with Steve. “Okay,” he says, in lieu of another robotic _yes_.

“So we know that your metal arm can feel,” Sam says, “And they treated it like it didn’t?”

Bucky has to force himself to give them a longer sentence. “More like they didn’t think they had to care. It was just a thing. No skin or bones to remind them it was a body part.” He grits his teeth, remembering. That’s why he broke his damn hand, they were trying to make him get his arm poked and prodded.

But Steve’s steadying hand is on his arm now. And Sam is saying “But it _is_ a body part. Even a prosthetic that can’t feel is a part of the wearer. That’s a terrible experience to have with a doctor, Bucky, let’s work on that today. We’ll take care of your arm, and I want you to work on giving us detailed feedback. Feedback is good, right? It helps us take care of you better.”

So Bucky gives another nod, and they set about testing what his arm can feel. Steve traces the edges of the plating with his fingertips. There’s no sensation from such a gentle touch, but it’s hypnotic to watch him follow every line. Then Steve raps his knuckles against the metal, and it’s not painful but the thumping sends vibrations through his arm that almost _itch_ , or at least that’s how his brain interprets the signals.

“Does that hurt, Buck?” Steve asks. He’s looking at Bucky when he asks, not at the arm. Bucky has to duck his head before he answers. 

“No,” he says, and then, because Sam said that feedback is _good_ , he risks, “Maybe, kind of. It’s more of a—a weird itch, I guess.”

Sam starts carefully writing that down while Steve pulls at the joints in Bucky’s fingers as if they’ll pop, and there’s a stretch but no burning. His wrist, elbow, and shoulder all feel the same way. At one point, Steve lowers his head until his lips brush the back of Bucky’s hand, and he _hums_ against the metal there, and Bucky doesn’t know what that feels like because he’s too busy trying to will himself out of blushing bright red.

And they keep asking him if things hurt it, and if he reports that something hurts, they stop doing that. And when Bucky tells them how it feels, Steve looks interested, like he actually cares about all these little details. No one in HYDRA ever spared a glance to his prosthetic unless it was damaged. But Steve looks at it like it’s something wonderful, and not just a weapon welded into his skin.

Sam directs Steve to hold the arm up and monitor how steadily Bucky can hold it, and Steve does so with a kind of focused intent that makes Bucky shiver.

It also makes him remember. He thinks Steve used to look like that when he was sketching, when he was giving something his full attention to capture a light or the exact fall of a shadow. 

Bucky thinks Steve used to look at him like that sometimes, drawing him. He thinks he remembers, even, catching Steve at it as he turned away from some chore and caught Steve sketching him from an odd angle. Memories have fallen in and out of his head in a jumble since he’s been away from HYDRA, but in the calm and steady space they’ve created between them, this memory blooms bright. A slant of sunlight falling brightly over Steve’s golden head and across Bucky’s face. It had been that sunlight on him that Steve had wanted to capture, Bucky thinks. And he’d given Steve shit for staring at him like that from behind, but Bucky thinks he’d been secretly pleased with the attention, and he thinks Steve knew it.

At least whatever weirdness in him that wants attention from Steve wasn’t entirely created by HYDRA. Bucky can’t be sure all his memories are real or accurate, but the more he stares at Steve’s eyes, so clear and set in concentration, the more he thinks this one surely is. Steve still draws, was using that room as an art studio before Bucky came. And the cramped conditions of the building in his memory match up with what he knows of the tenement apartment they shared. Sunlight only made it through the whole apartment at very certain times of the day, because there weren’t a lot of windows. That’s why Steve had wanted to draw it so badly, that day, he thinks with wonder. He _remembers_. He _knows_. And as much as he’d teased Steve, he’d had a soft spot for that, about him—that he’d see the sunlight falling just so and just have to turn it into art, even as it fell through their dump of an apartment. No, _especially_ there.

Sometimes when they’re working on him, a horrifying or excruciating memory comes up, and Sam has him talk through it. It usually helps calm him, and then Steve will “examine” the part of him they hurt, or Sam will affirm that this was a terrible medical experience and he’ll be treated more professionally here. But this is the first time a _positive_ memory has surfaced from doing this, and before Bucky knows it Sam’s halting Steve’s examination of his arm to ask him gently what’s made him grin like that. And he has Bucky tell him about that too, even though he’s shy to do so. The space is confidential. It’s _safe_. Feedback helps them help him more effectively, Sam said so and he’s the lead doctor here.

Steve’s not giving him that intent look anymore. He’s looking at Bucky in amazed wonder and he’s smiling back and his eyes are wet and shining but not like Bucky’s hurting him, this time.

Steve’s smiling because of Bucky and Bucky’s smiling back, both of them grinning like dopes and neither of them able to stop. Steve’s hand is on Bucky’s metal hand, now, and it feels less than the flesh hand but Bucky can tell from the faint warmth enveloping it that Steve’s holding on tight. If someone in HYDRA had held onto him like that, it would mean he was about to be strapped down. He’d have to force his breathing to stay steady as he awaited whatever new horror they’d come up with. But here, it doesn’t make him tense. Not that he would ever have dared pull away as the Soldier, but now he doesn’t _want_ to. Steve has him and they asked him to keep still and he’d do it even if they set him on fire as long as it means Steve would keep smiling at him like that. Not that Steve would ever hurt him. It really sinks in now, more tangibly than ever before, how _safe_ he is with Steve. Steve keeps him safe. To Steve, he’s not a weapon or a tool or even a threat. He’s just Bucky.

He doesn’t know what to do with that. It’s almost too much to think about, so he stops thinking and just smiles like a dope. He can’t help it. It just bubbles over from his chest like the rare sunbeam in that crappy old apartment.

When they’re finally done being dopes, Sam tells them this examination has yielded positive results and that he thinks they have more work to do.

_“Hell_ yeah, we do,” Bucky says, and is rewarded with another Steve smile. He feels better than calm. Calm and elated and held, all at once. Like Steve’s got him and, for once, like he’s got Steve, too.

Okay, so Sam was right about this dumb little experiment. They _definitely_ have to keep doing this.

*

“If this examination proves productive,” Steve murmurs, his fingers probing lightly in ways that make Bucky want to push back against his hand, “We could potentially progress to more extensive examinations for enhanced results. Would you like me to tell you what that might entail?”

Bucky nods frantically. “Yes,” he grunts, jerking back involuntarily against Steve’s fingers, his body seeking that sweet spot he’s just so close to touching. Steve is the best thing to happen to his body, the best set of eyes to hold on him like this, and right now Bucky can’t imagine wanting to know anything but what Steve might think of to test what his body will do. 

“I might bring in a variety of instruments,” Steve informs him, and Bucky shudders with anticipation or fear, he can’t tell which. Steve’s still got him though, his free hand warm and stroking down Bucky’s spine in a slow, soothing motion. “Of course, I will inform you prior to use of any object. You’ll be told exactly what it is…” 

Steve strokes his back and gently crooks his fingers inside him. “...and what will be done with it…”

Bucky moans involuntarily, and tries instinctively to clamp down on the noise, then reminds himself that noise is okay. Noise is good. Steve asked for vocal feedback. So he can know what Bucky feels. So he can do a good job with Bucky’s body.

“...and what it might feel like,” Steve murmurs, crooking his fingers into the bright, sweet spot again after so much agonizing teasing. Bucky cries out softly and is almost ashamed, but Steve is still rubbing his back and pressing into that spot and he says, “Good. Good, Bucky,” and so Bucky lets his body writhe and cry out again. The room is contained. The room is confidential and holds his cry and only Steve can hear him.

“I first might try an apparatus that I carry on my own person at all times. It’s very apt for this purpose,” Steve says smoothly, and Bucky finds himself surprised by the urge to laugh. He’d thought he was too far on the verge of fear for that, but Steve is so earnestly committed to the part, even when he’s talking about fucking him up the ass in a lab coat. “Before we can advance to that stage, I will have to procure a protective barrier for the apparatus, for sanitary purposes.”

Bucky does laugh a little into the table then, the sound turning into a moan as he becomes aware of his laughter making him tighten in a rhythm around Steve’s fingers. Bucky’s pretty sure he’s the only one in the world who could find that an erotic way of describing a rubber, and Steve knows it. He can’t help but find it a little funny. They’re alone in the room, they’re okay even if this whole situation is _absurd,_ and Steve, bless him, has done his research by a combination of looking into the ways that real doctors actually speak to their patients and observing, in all earnestness, some of the strangest and dumbest pornography Bucky has ever seen. They’re in this bizarre situation together and it’s at least a little bit funny. He _shouldn’t_ think it’s funny, he realizes when he thinks about what the situation arose from, and for some darkly humorous reason that makes him laugh even more. Steve’s fingers are still in his ass and he gasps as he tightens around them, his ribs aching from repressed laughter and moans. “Tell me what else you’re going to use on me, Doctor Rogers.” It’s the first time he’s really spoken and deliberately broken the silence, but he has to egg Steve on, he has to hear more.

Steve picks it up, staying right in the scene for Bucky. “Well,” begins, authoritative but betrayed by a slight breathiness that lets Bucky know _exactly_ how much Steve is enjoying his naked ass and this line of conversation, “During more thorough examinations I may have to request that you move into a variety of positions for observational purposes.”

It’s embarrassing how strongly the arousal surges directly to his cock at the very words. Bucky grunts and pushes himself up off the table. There’s no way he can lie flat anymore. He has to arch his back a little, propping himself up with his knees since his arms still hang limply off the table where Steve had him put them when they started. He’s entirely conscious of how this puts his spread ass directly in Steve’s face.

“Hmm,” Steve observes, “from what I can see, you’re ready for the next stage of this procedure. I’m going to check your testicles now, if you’re ready?”

_If_ he’s ready. All he can fucking do is nod into the table, his cheek smashed into the cushioned top of it, wriggling back against Steve’s hand and trying not to whine for it.

He feels the heat of Steve’s hand moments before it cradles his balls, his fingers stroking around them and prodding teasingly at the divots where his thighs meet his groin. Bucky does whine a little then, impatient.

“Vocal response is good,” Steve notes, and Bucky flushes. He’s going to come apart, but his noises are good, Steve’s in charge and he says Bucky’s doing _good_. “Can I get a verbal confirmation that you’re ready for further testing?”

“Yes,” Bucky spits out, impatient and embarrassed in spite of himself. He’s entirely splayed out with Steve’s hands between his legs, every part of him on full display, and Steve’s still probing into him and he can see more than just Bucky’s body. He’s holding everything. _Everything_. And he’s still got two fingers firmly in his asshole. Steady but unyielding, he gives Bucky’s balls a quick, gentle squeeze, pushing up behind them with his thumb in a way that makes him gasp and jerk against the table, his chest sweaty and peeling from the padded vinyl as he writhes. 

“Clearly your testicles are in excellent condition,” Steve notes, squeezing again. “And they look good. _Very_ good. Sensory response is quite sharp, and I feel no abnormalities.” He takes his hand off Bucky’s balls for a moment to pat him on the ass. “Everything feels _perfect_ so far, as a matter of fact.”

Bucky has to press his face into the table at the words. He sort of hates how much he loves this.  
  
“I will have to test them a little more thoroughly just to make sure.” And there’s Steve’s hand working his balls again, and rhythmic sensations are pooling and throbbing in Bucky’s abdomen now. He’s panting a little, he realizes, and trying to keep his breathing silent. With effort, he lets himself go ahead and do it. Noise is okay. _Reactions_ are okay. With Steve, they’re _good_. Steve wants to _see_ what his body can feel. “Oh, yes, these are in excellent condition. As a matter of fact, they may be the best testicles I’ve ever seen.”

Bucky makes a noise he’s never heard himself make and presses his face into the vinyl. But. “Are they, Doctor?” he adds quietly, flushing at himself. He presses back, trying to work some release out of the fingers in his ass, and grunts into the table when another wave of arousal hits. But Steve’s voice is good. It reminds him that his own voice is okay and good here, and his body is good too. Steve can make it so, so good.

“Well,” Steve considers, “I could do a hormonal check. Shall I, Bucky? Do you want your hormones tested today?”

Bucky nods rapidly into the table, not even caring what Steve’s planning next but needing _more_ , and then immediately writhes again as he feels Steve’s warm breath between his legs as Steve _noses_ at his balls. Bucky can’t understand how there’s enough blood left in his face for it to get this red as Steve draws in a long, dramatic sniff in his groin, working his nose between his balls and his thigh. “Oh,” Steve’s voice is a little rough now, like he wants to come apart himself, “Oh, yeah. Those pass with _flying_ colors. I think we’re ready to proceed, Buck. Are we?”

Bucky nearly sobs aloud with embarrassment and enjoyment all at once. “Yes,” he gasps, because Steve wants to know, wants _verbal confirmation_ that Bucky’s body is ready for this. “Yes, do it.”

Steve lightly kisses the space between Bucky’s balls and his thigh and Bucky cuts off a _wail_. He grits his teeth. He can’t make noise like this he can’t but he’s coming apart and Steve will hold him if he does. And Steve is moving the kissing to his asscheeks and his hand is sliding up his balls. “I need to check the functionality of this apparatus. Are you ready to begin this stage of testing?” Steve is trying so hard to hold onto his clinical voice but it’s so ragged and Bucky can tell how much he loves touching him like this, making him feel good, hearing him, hearing the noises he can get Bucky to make. Bucky can’t let go of another sound right now, but the padded table is slick with tears of relief as he nods into it again. Yes. Yes, he’s ready, he’s so ready, and Steve’s hand is moving away for a second, and he achingly misses it in the empty space where it had been— 

Bucky can hear the wet _blop_ of lube being squeezed out of the bottle and then Steve’s hand is on his

_Oh_

All Bucky’s breath leaves him, his chest flattened against the table, as his hips jerk and he ruts into Steve’s slippery hand.

“Perfect,” Steve breathes, grasping tighter, “Your reflexes, they’re perfect, now I think we can proceed to a third finger of penetration. Now, are you ready?”

Bucky swears he can feel his asshole quivering as he thinks about being filled by Steve like that, hitting that bright, painfully sweet spot inside him. He wants to say yes, but he’s so overwhelmed by Steve’s slick hand gripping onto his cock and his one slow, stroking thumb that he can’t make a sound. He’s biting down hard and he’s trying, trying to remind himself. Sound is okay. Sound is good. Steve told him it’s okay not to hold back. He’s overwhelmed. All of him is so filled. But it’s Steve who’s got his body and Steve says it’s okay. Steve won’t proceed until he says he wants it.

“Ye—yes,” he sobs into the table. Steve _wants_ to hear it. Steve _wants_ to know what _Bucky_ wants. “Yes, Steve, please, do it.” He shakes at how loud and rough and _open_ his broken voice is in the small room. Steve’s warm hands keep stroking him and his body keeps moving rhythmically _into_ them, _into_ them and making a warmth rise up inside of him too.

“I’ll prepare your body for it,” Steve tells him. His face is in Bucky’s ass again, breathing between his asscheeks and _licking_ around his fingers against his hole. He wriggles his fingers around, and all inside Bucky is so bright and he opens up to Steve’s softly prodding tongue without even thinking about it and then the third finger is there, probing, gentle and nothing hurts when he slowly works it in with the other two. Bucky feels nothing but filled, shaking around Steve. He can’t even bring himself to push back anymore, his thighs straining with the efforts of holding himself still. It’s so _much_ and so _strong hot_ and _bright_ as Steve slides him wide open with the third finger easing all the way into home. And then he’s pressing up on the magic spot and there’s lightning behind Bucky’s vision, but not like the chair. It’s so much and his breath has caught for several seconds, but it’s all pleasure, he realizes after that first overwhelming moment, all pleasure and none of the pain.

The soft sound that’s torn from his lungs isn’t at all a conscious choice this time. But there’s no room for him to be afraid of it when Steve’s still working him rhythmically in response to his heavy, gasping breath and telling him “That’s it, Bucky. You’re doing good. Good—good result, good feedback, that’s just right, you’re doing good, you’re doing so good, you’re so good, Bucky, you are so good.”

So Bucky keeps moaning and gasping and Steve keeps responding to him by pushing his fingers up again, and again, and spasms shake Bucky’s body again and again because Steve’s got him and he’s so, so _good_.

*

After Bucky remembers Steve sketching in the sunlight, more memories keep tumbling out with every session, as if Steve’s shaken something loose in Bucky’s head with his examinations. There’s the day when Steve runs his hands over Bucky’s back, feeling each ridge in his spine and every rib through his skin, and Bucky remembers much smaller hands kneading at his shoulders, trying to soothe away stiffness after a long day at work.

When Steve feels Bucky’s neck and jaw, asking him to swallow as he gently cradles Bucky’s throat in his hand, Bucky remembers Steve reaching up with a washcloth to mop at a shaving nick on Bucky’s chin. Steve’s hands had stayed on his face even after the bleeding was stemmed, eventually letting go by trailing his long fingers all the way down to Bucky’s waist.

Bucky had sat in his room staring out the window for a while after that one. He was sure there was more to the memory—or maybe just something already there that he was missing—but nothing came to mind as easily without Steve’s hands on him, and eventually he gave up trying. He thinks there’s something there that he can’t access yet because it’s—too difficult, and too complicated. He doesn’t understand why it would hurt to think about, but he thinks maybe it will.

He’s calmer, though, more functional. Their sessions with Sam don’t keep him from having vivid, gripping nightmares, but he’s able to come back to himself more quickly after waking—no more swinging at Steve or putting holes in the walls.

Sam says it can take a while after living in unsafe conditions for a traumatized person’s mind to really trust their surroundings again, and that those moments of mistrust can resurface at any moment if the person got used to having to protect themself from threats at a moment’s notice. Bucky thinks about that when he wakes up in the bedroom Steve set up for him and is able to immediately differentiate it from the places in his nightmares. It _does_ feel safer. He can strip off his sweaty nightclothes and exchange them for soft, freshly laundered ones, some of which he even picked out himself. He’s been functional enough for long trips outside without constantly feeling like he’s going to panic and murder someone, so he’s gotten to go shopping a couple of times. He enjoyed selecting new clothes a lot more than he’d anticipated. Steve tells him he was always very selective with his wardrobe in the past, too, but Bucky doesn’t remember that.

Sometimes, if one of them has had a particularly rough night, they’ll come and sit in the other’s room, on the floor or the edge of the bed, just watching until they feel calm enough to go back to bed themselves. It means Bucky’s actually begun to get something resembling a normal amount of sleep, and Sam says that can only be a plus for his poor, battered head.

It’s good in other ways, too. Sometimes Bucky wakes briefly to see Steve silhouetted on the edge of his bed and he knows that at least he can bring him some sort of peace. Be good to him in at least some way. And seeing how much Steve really loves him—enough that seeing Bucky safely sleeping in the room next to his own brings him comfort and calm—makes him feel a little more comfortable in his place here. He’s more than just a destructive wreck that Steve has to worry about all of the time.

So the sessions are helping and maybe, _maybe_ Bucky won’t be so quick to brush off any of Sam’s advice that he doesn’t quite like. He’s not sure about seeing a shrink, at least not yet. He’s felt exposed enough to strangers for one lifetime. But Steve’s been talking about taking him to the Tower so he can meet Steve’s team and Tony Stark’s medical staff, so they can start setting up an examination practice that won’t trigger Bucky into a murderous rampage.

When he’d confessed, during one session that had unlocked a particularly troublesome memory, to attacking techs at random, Steve had just firmly said, “Good.”

It’s during a session when they’re working on his face when the troubling memory comes and hits him with full force, and he understands the reason it’s been messing with him, too. 

They’ve done his face a few times, since those are pretty standard medical exams—they shine lights in his eyes (but never before warning him, another nice shift from HYDRA) and make him track their movements. They’ll look into his ears and throat to check for perfect health and responsiveness, and then Sam will have Steve feel under his chin. That’s something doctors sometimes do at checkups, to test for certain cancers, Sam says. Bucky’s pretty sure he can’t get cancer, but it’s the ritual of the practice that really matters. The touching doesn’t hurt, and it’s respectful and gentle and caring. None of it is sinister, and all of it is explained. He is questioned and allowed to answer, and sometimes Sam revisits things he’s written down in his little notepad, but none of those things are ever used against him in any punitive or manipulative sense.

It’s just that Steve’s fingers brush against his lips very briefly when he’s feeling Bucky’s cheeks and under his chin. And Bucky can taste them—they haven’t procured any real medical equipment (Sam wants to get them syringes to simulate vaccinations, so Bucky can experience small, controlled pains that are explained, and can see that they’ll never put him through anything excruciating while he’s conscious) and so Steve’s not wearing gloves and Bucky tastes his fingers.

It’s only brief—it had been inadvertent, he’d been sticking out his tongue a moment earlier so they could look down his throat, but the taste had been unmistakeable. It was a particular kind of charcoal and wood-shaving mix—the taste of charcoal pencil. And Bucky knows that, and he knows he doesn’t know that from the modern day. He’s tasted that before, and it was on Steve’s then-delicate fingers. Steve had used charcoal pencils before, and Bucky can remember how hard it had been to save up any kind of money for new art supplies, but that’s not what’s important about this memory.

What’s important is Bucky knows, without knowing how he knows, that last time he tasted remnants of artistic endeavors on Steve’s fingers, it was deliberate.

He viscerally feels cool air on his bare chest through all the years, even though he knows that he’s wearing a baggy workout tank and his boxers. They’ve chosen his clothes for easy access to his body, like an examiner would need to have, but he’s more covered than he would be if he were dressed in a paper examination gown. Sam had thought he’d feel more comfortable starting out that way. He knows that’s what he’s wearing now, but when he tastes charcoal pencil on Steve’s fingers he’s wearing something else for just a flash of memory.

He’s sitting in an armchair that’s worn and understuffed. He thinks they got it used from—from where? A neighbor? The chair smelled a little funny, like stale beer and something else. Wet dog, maybe, something musky. It was all they had. It’s jarring and incongruous, smelling it in the memory and not in real life, because he’s really there leaning back in the old, worn, patched-up armchair, his chest fully out in the cool evening air. His belt is unbuckled and his pants are unbuttoned, and that’s because he’s—

He’s _hard_ , in the memory. Aroused but trying to keep his breath steady, feigning a relaxed pose in the chair, his erect cock straining against the fabric of his underwear, pushing through the opening in his pants. That’s why Steve tastes like charcoal pencil; he was drawing _Bucky_. Like that. His shirt off, his pants undone, erection in full view. Smudging lightly at the paper with his fingers to get the charcoal shading _just_ right.

And when he was finally done, or maybe when he just couldn’t stave off his own arousal one moment longer, he put down his sketchpad and came over to Bucky, put his hands on Bucky’s face like he’s got them now. Only he wasn’t feeling Bucky’s chin then. He was cupping it. Bucky had taken his hand and moved it to his lips for a kiss, opening his mouth to _lick_ those slender fingers that never missed a detail. He’d taken a couple of Steve’s fingers into his mouth, and then—

And that’s the end of what Bucky can remember, and Steve’s done feeling his neck and chin for cancerous lumps. He reports to Sam that nothing feels abnormal and Bucky lets his breath out. It’s left him reeling, all that memory in the span of a couple short moments.

It might not be real. He doesn’t always remember things in ways that make sense. Except this _does_ make sense, because there were those troubling, lurking memories and now he might know why. Troubling because there are some things that happened in HYDRA that stripped him more thoroughly from his own body than any plain medical examination ever had. He’s told them, now, a little bit about what they did to him on that table and in the chair, and what it made of him. Risked letting them see that, hold that part of him and look at it and mend it.

He _never_ wants _anyone_ to see that. Not the worse thing. Things. Things they’d done to him. That he’d let them do, after they’d taught him to let them pry him apart in any way, shape, or form they said was necessary. Sometimes, damn him, he’d even believed _that_ was...a part of it. They both had left him feeling empty, turned inside-out and hung up to dry…

If he’s got this confused, if he’s mixed his memories of Steve with _that_.

But. He doesn’t _think_ so. What had happened with Steve had felt, in his memory, natural and _right_. There’s no metal arm in the memory, and the pants were not the Asset’s black tactical pants. But even more so, because his body had felt, without Bucky even having to think about it, like it had _belonged_ to Steve. Like Steve’s careful gaze and lingering attentions had made it more whole and right than he could ever have imagined being. When Steve’s examining him, he feels just about that way now.

They’re staring at him, and he comes a little more fully back to the present, but still dazed at what he’s just seen and felt. They’re asking him if he’s okay, if he was triggered, if there’s anything they can do for him. Steve’s eyes are all worried, his brow furrowed, and Bucky finally regains the presence of mind to shake his head.

“I’m fine,” he manages quietly. “Just—a memory. Not a bad one,” he clarifies.

He can see that they want to ask. But he’s still so scared he’s somehow got this wrong, that he’s going to give _that_ all away. And Sam’s here. Back then, it was dangerous, for the wrong people to know, Bucky thinks. And how would he know that if he hadn’t really lived it?

“Steve?” He finally risks asking. He has to know. He holds Steve’s gaze, even though it feels like looking into the sun. “What were we? You and I. Back, before, when we lived in that apartment?”

And Steve’s face gives him all the answer he needs, even before he speaks. He’s smiling and teary at once, almost like it’s _collapsed_ into a relieved kind of joy. And he’s sitting down on the bed now, right next to Bucky, and taking his hands. And, Sam’s presence be damned, Bucky holds onto them and looks into Steve’s wet, relieved eyes and sinks down onto his shoulder like he’s letting himself slide down into Steve’s warmth like a hot bath.

And they sit there like that for a long time, Steve holding tight and pressing his face into Bucky’s hair.

*

There was another surgery to improve the arm. Presumably. No one had bothered to tell the Soldier the purpose of the treatment, but he cannot recall any loss of functioning before the procedure, so he doubts they were repairing damage. Whatever the reason, he sits on the examination table, moving his arm as the technician directs him.

Each movement of his shoulder agitates the otherwise dulling pain beneath his skin. The surgeons did not touch his bones, but his scapula, his ribs, even his sternum all throb from within.

When the Soldier first received the prosthetic, his bones were not modified to account for its weight and strength. The first time he had used it, his ribs snapped as easily as the throat he’d been ordered to crush. Later, the surgeons had coated his bones in metal to reinforce them.

He hopes, if this latest upgrade has increased the weight of the arm, that the added strain will not be too much for his coated bones to bear. He does not relish the prospect of forcing himself to lie still on the table while sinew is pulled away from his skeleton.

“Good,” the technician says. “Make a fist.”

The Soldier does. He resolves to stop thinking about hypothetical outcomes of the modification, and to ignore the pain. It will fade quickly enough.

“Good.” The technician has not once met the Soldier’s eyes. That in itself is not notable—it’s rare that anyone does unless his eyes are the focus of the examination—but the stare he gives the prosthetic strikes the Soldier as atypical. He doesn’t look at it like a weapon or a body part. He doesn’t appear to be intently watching for malfunction.

He just stares as if there’s nothing else in the world.

“Really good,” the technician continues. “Now, spread your fingers as far as they’ll go.”

The Soldier does. His shoulder aches. A light overhead flickers and hums. It’s unpleasant.

“All right,” says the technician. He makes a note on the chart. Then he stands and looks away from the arm for the first time, sparing a glance toward the door. “One more thing, get on your hands and knees.”

The Soldier tenses his jaw, bracing for the movement. His spine alights as he shifts over. He tries to anticipate what will come next. Likely, the test is to ensure the arm can support weight pressing down on it from above. The technician will ask him to lift his other arm and put as much force on the prosthetic as he can, probably. It should not increase the pain in his back, but his sternum and ribs will hurt immensely.

It doesn’t matter. The Soldier will endure it.

The technician doesn’t tell him to raise his flesh arm. He doesn’t say a word. But his hands are at the Soldier’s waistband and his pants are pulled down around his knees in a swift motion.

The air is cold against his skin.

“Make a fist,” the technician says, and the Soldier does. Something within his chest screams internally. It must be his ribs.

“Fist yourself,” the technician says, a tremble in his voice. The Soldier knows the meaning without any memory of fulfilling the order before.

The metal is cold against him and he fights back a flinch. The burn as he presses inward is worst than the fire in his bones, exponentially worse. It’s a procedure. It’s just a procedure. It will be over quickly, and the pain will fade. All the Soldier must do is endure.

His eyes sting with involuntary tears. He forces his head upward, staring into the flickering light. He tries to discern a pattern to the flicker, a consistency in the malfunction. He tries to be anywhere but here, with his body stretching impossibly and blazing immensely, worsening inch by inch.

Over the hum of the light, the Soldier hears a zipper. The sweat from his exertion freezes on his skin.

“Good,” says the technician. “Now, spread your fingers as wide as they’ll go.”

*

Steve explains to Bucky that he hadn’t talked to him about what they were before, aside from being best friends. He hadn’t wanted to put any sort of pressure on him. He could tell that Bucky was beating himself up for not being the same Bucky he had been before, and he hadn’t wanted to add _that_ pressure too.

Bucky thinks back to how he was when he first moved in with Steve and thinks that was probably the right call, but it still makes him sad. He remembers the desperate sadness underlying the relief he’d seen on Steve’s face when he’d finally remembered what they’d been. He thinks about what it would be like to share that with someone and then have them not remember it—and wonder if they ever, ever will.

And still, Steve had been careful never to show it when Bucky first moved in. He just gave and cared and waved away Bucky’s apologies for being a destructive basket case and gave him endless chances to keep trying again.

Bucky is glad, after thinking about that, that Steve had told him it was okay if he didn’t feel like he could have that kind of relationship at this point. Steve had known he was still struggling, and that was the whole reason he’d never brought it up before—he hadn’t wanted Bucky to think he _had_ to do that for Steve. But thinking about everything Steve’s done for him, Bucky doesn’t think he’d be able to say no to _anything_ he wanted.

But what Steve wants, more than anything, more even than for Bucky to sleep in his bed and kiss his fingers like they used to and give over his body to him, is for Bucky to be _well_. Safe and cared-for and well. And Bucky doesn’t really think he can do any of those things, now, and a heavy stomach and sick twist in his heart tells him these things would make him very, _very_ unwell.

Part of it is just because he really is re-learning how to be a human, and he’s not sure he fully knows how to _do_ all the things that people do when they have relationships like that. And Bucky knows that Steve would be patient with it, but he doesn’t want him to _have_ to be. All he’s done is give. Bucky would want to be able to give back, especially in this. Part of it is just because he knows he’d be desperately trying to remember the way he’d done things with Steve before, and beating himself up if he failed to do them the exact same way now.

Part of it is the Other Thing. The one he’s never sure he’ll even say out loud.

Things do get a little better for Bucky, though, after they talk all of that out. He gets to ask Steve questions about what they used to be like, and it makes him feel better about the way he is now, in a weird sort of way. After all, he knows that normal adults don’t require the level of supervision and checking-in and comfort that he does. Sometimes he has to just sit next to Steve after a nightmare and lean against him while Steve pets his hair and reassures him that he’s safe. It feels almost childlike, how needy and clingy he can be, and then he remembers that he and Steve used to switch back and forth between whose bed they were sharing so each bed would look slept-in should anyone come over to visit. Given the history between them, maybe a little dependence on the occasional nighttime snuggling session isn’t actually that weird.

It also makes him feel a little less self-conscious about the weird roleplays that he does with Sam and Steve. He remembers being literally face-to-ass with Steve on the dirty wooden floor of their dumpy Brooklyn apartment back in the day—it was too risky to do it on the furniture, it often meant unexplainable stains, unmistakable sex smells, or the off chance that someone would glimpse them through the window of a neighboring apartment. They laid down towels sometimes, but even then, when he railed Steve on the floor Steve’s skinny hips and bony elbows would have bruises for days afterwards. Bucky used to rub at them guiltily and try to kiss them better while Steve teased him for all his worrying. “You know I’ve had worse,” he’d smirk, or, if Bucky got scared of hurting him down on that floor he’d egg him on, make him keep going even if he was getting short of breath. “You know,” he’d pant, “You know—damn well—I could do this—all day.”

So a little bit of playing doctor probably isn’t the weirdest thing he’s ever done, and if Steve is willing to keep doing it then Bucky is maybe open to letting go of some of the embarrassment he had about needing this so much.

It especially helps when Sam goes online and shows him the extent of the roleplaying games that some real people apparently _do_ , in therapeutic contexts or even just for fucking. Bucky refuses to allow himself to think too much about some of those—some of these people are apparently boning while dressing like toddlers or leashed up like puppies or a wide range of things he would have _never_ imagined mixing with sex.

He does focus on the non-sexual roleplays, though, and the specifics of how people decided to engage in that kind of weird, comforting therapeutic work. They explain what they get out of it—one woman explains that she experienced an unstable and traumatic childhood following a series of moves and her mother’s unstable boyfriend when she was eight years old, so she likes to regress to about six or seven, the last time she can remember her childhood being uncomplicated and happy. And she has this friend who’s not her girlfriend but just likes to come over to her house and let her play like a six-year-old, wearing pigtails and cutesy dresses and having tea parties with dolls, or whatever it is six-year-old girls do. She has a whole separate bedroom for when she’s Little, as she calls it, so that she can separate that life from her adult life. That way, her boyfriend isn’t lying down with her at night in a child’s princess-canopy bed. Bucky cannot imagine the conversations that would have to happen in relationships like that, but apparently people do it.

There’s another woman who has lived with a severe chronic illness for many years. She curates a website containing photos that cutesify various medical equipment and aids such as feeding tubes, pills, and syringes. She has a whole page explaining how her traumatic experiences of feeling sick and having invasive surgeries have been customized to a comforting, cute aesthetic on her site. It provides a contrast to the disgusting and painful ugliness she has to face in procedures involving her body. Bucky can absolutely understand that one, more than he understands dressing like an animal or a baby.

So, fine, he’s weird and his coping mechanism is weird. But it’s helping and he knows he’s not alone in needing weird shit to get by. He’s definitely not the strangest out there, anyway. 

It’s going so well that Sam finally retries the topic of having him see a real doctor about his metal arm. 

“I know it hurts your back,” he tells Bucky, “and it throws off the way you walk. You’re re-healing it, but it might be worthwhile to see if there’s anything they can do to alleviate the muscle strain.”

Previously, Bucky had thought that some mild muscle aches were worth avoiding anyone in a lab coat laying hands or eyes on him. He’s learned basic maintenance of his own arm, but he doesn’t know if he could fix a major malfunction should it occur. And one of Steve’s teammates is actually Howard Stark’s kid, and apparently he inherited his dad’s brains. Steve thinks if anyone can adjust the arm, Tony Stark can do it, and most importantly, he’d take the time to calibrate some proper anesthesia if a surgical procedure was necessary. Bucky wouldn’t have to be awake while he was opened up.

He thinks he’d be fine with that as long as Steve watched over him while he was knocked out. He can’t stomach the thought of being drugged out with no supervision. They could sit in Stark’s lab during the scanning process, and have doctors come in without their lab coats to do the actual assessment. If he ended up needing to spend time in an actual operating room, he’d be under for most of that time. They could work out the logistics of keeping him calm while the anesthesiologist actually put him under.

Bucky thinks maybe they could do it. It’d be good to have an ally with expertise on the arm, anyway, in case of a severe malfunction. He figures that he can sit through the scans, at least.

He’s done a lot of calming work since they first tried to discuss his arm. But Sam still thinks it’d be a good idea to do a roleplay session with it before attempting an actual scan, given how badly he freaked that time. 

Bucky can’t argue with that. He’s calmed down considerably since they started doing regular roleplay sessions, and they’ve been able to talk out other safeguards for when he’s starting to freak. His confidence in his ability to do this has skyrocketed, but he does still remember the nausea rising in him when he looked at his fucked-up hand after he’d crushed it. 

They talk about what they’re going to do before they actually start on it. And they have a lot to keep busy with in the meantime. They’ve been using the kitchen table as a makeshift examination table, but since the roleplays have been so helpful for Bucky, they go out and get materials to build a medical examination table for more accurate simulations. Once they cover it in cushioned vinyl, Sam explains, Bucky will be able to comfortably remain on it in numerous positions for exams. 

“We’ll start with the basic examinations we’ve done in the past,” Sam explains, while Bucky helps him affix the vinyl to the underside of the table’s surface. “You were comfortable last time we did that, weren’t you?”

“Yeah,” Bucky answers, neatly punching wood staples through the edge of the vinyl with the metal hand. “Yeah, that actually—I’d had some kind of fucked-up thoughts about the arm, before, I guess.” His heart rate still kicks up a little when they talk about his issues, even though Sam’s been nothing but helpful and kind. “Well, you get a hunk of murder metal strapped to your side, see if you don’t get a little fucked up about it.”

Sam remains undistracted by this, looking at him with that same steady, piercing look that makes Bucky feel weirdly _seen_ , all the way through. He’s not sure if it’s comforting or discomforting. He focuses his gaze on the staples.

“I think we’ll probably have to talk a little more about that, either during the examination or after, depending on what feels most comfortable for you,” Sam says. Bucky sighs and lets his forehead fall against the varnished wood of the table. “I know,” he adds sympathetically, “But it’ll help us help you, Bucky. And it’ll give us a better idea of how we might prepare for an actual examination.”

Bucky sighs. He briefly debates whether his low-level backache would be worth just enduring forever to avoid that discussion. But maybe Steve can help him feel better about it, too. Sometimes stuff is really hard and painful to purge out, but then he feels a lot better after Steve goes over it with him during examinations. He thinks it might take a lot of sessions to get through his complicated relationship with his own left arm, though.

“Fine,” he mutters, and shoves in another staple, adhering the vinyl covering firmly around the head of the table. Sam mercifully eases up for a while and lets him work in silence. “Let’s get it over with, though,” he adds eventually, just so he’s not stressing about the talk for days, “If Steve’s up for it when he gets back, we could just start right then.”

Steve is up for it, of course. He’s always a hundred and ten percent eager to do absolutely anything that’ll help Bucky, enough that it makes Bucky feel more than a little guilty sometimes, like he’s keeping Steve from having any sort of a life. Although Sam’s told him quietly that before he came in from the cold, Steve didn’t really have much of a life besides his workouts and punching things and being sad. It sounds endearingly, annoyingly, heartbreakingly like him, so that just ends up making Bucky feel sad instead of guilty. 

While Steve showers off his workout sweat and gets changed into his lab coat, Bucky slips into the oversized nightshirt they got to simulate a hospital gown while providing a little more coverage in the back. It had taken a few sessions for him to be able to actually wear it during an examination, feeling uncomfortably exposed and a little too vulnerable even for Steve and Sam for a little while after he’d first tried it on. Sam had just said it was a good thing they hadn’t gotten him an actual hospital gown, the kind that left the patient’s entire ass hanging out. Bucky had wholeheartedly agreed.

He sits up on the table waiting for Steve while Sam pulls out the handful of medical supplies he’s begun to procure for them. They have a stethoscope, now, and some sterilizing alcohol wipes, and a handful of tongue depressors. And of course, Sam’s notepad. After Bucky had expressed some apprehension about having his notes lying around, Sam showed him how he’d been encrypting them just in case their place was raided by HYDRA. Bucky’s impressed by the foresight; it’s something he’d have thought of, but he’s found that even a lot of people who think they’re well-trained leave sensitive info just lying around all of the time. Sam’s sharp as hell; he and Steve are lucky to have him.

Finally Steve enters the room, carefully taking the stethoscope and hanging it around his neck. “I hope you haven’t been waiting long,” he says smoothly, “But I think we’re ready to begin our examination, if I can just start with a few questions today?”

Bucky nods, already beginning to slip into a relaxed, passive state in anticipation of Steve taking over for him. 

“All right, so just as a general question, how are you feeling today?”

“Fine,” Bucky reports, though he’s still a little nervous for whatever Talk is coming about his arm and everything that’s happened to—and because of—this cursed patch of chrome-style Frankenbody. Awash in the headspace Steve and Sam have created for him, he’s able to let go of it for at least the time being. Maybe he’ll be able to relax enough during the exam that the talk won’t be as rough.

“Fine, hmm. Okay, then. Let’s talk about what specifically brings you in today?”

“It’s my arm, doc,” Bucky manages to slip into the style of banter they’ve established, so far from the robotic self-reporting HYDRA made him do. “Well, my shoulder, really, and my back. They’ve been getting pretty sore. I think my prosthetic is too heavy.”

“I see. Yes, my assistant had mentioned that to me, and I think we’ll take a look at you right away. While we’re here, though, I’m going to start us off with a brief physical checkup, just to make sure all’s well. After that, I’m going to examine your prosthetic, as well as your shoulder and your back. Shall we get started?”

Bucky nods, and Steve begins placing the earbuds of the stethoscope into his ears. “First I’m going to listen to your heartbeat.”

They always start with some sort of basic physical to set the mood and help ease Bucky in. Steve’s so practiced at this point, he doesn’t even need Sam to tell him what to do. “I’m going to place this on your heart and move it around,” he instructs, “and with each placement I need you to take a deep, slow breath in and out.”

Bucky nods again, and Steve carefully presses the stethoscope against his heart. It’s not as cold through the nightshirt as it had been when they placed it against Bucky’s bare skin under his shirt, but still a little cool. “Breathe in...breathe out,” Steve says steadily. “Good.” He slides the stethoscope across Bucky’s chest. “Breathe in...breathe out...good.” Bucky falls further and further into the calm care of Steve’s voice and eyes and soft hands moving the stethoscope across the fabric of his nightshirt. His words are rhythmic and slow, predictable. He tells Bucky what he’s doing. He tells Bucky what he needs him to do. He tells him he’s doing good. Repeat.

Steve moves on to Bucky’s back with the stethoscope, and the sliding cool of it makes goosebumps prick up on his arms. He thinks he runs a little cooler when he’s breathing loud and slow like this, nothing occupying his thoughts but what Steve needs him to do next. “Breathe in,” he says slowly, “And...breathe out...good. All right, that all sounds good, Bucky. Your heartbeat and lungs are strong. Now I’m going to check your throat.” He accepts a tongue depressor from Sam. “Open your mouth and say _ahhh_.”

Bucky complies. Steve makes sure Bucky can see the tongue depressor before carefully placing it on the back of his tongue. Bucky catches the faint taste of woodgrain as Steve flicks his flashlight on. His eyes glitter in the reflective pinpoint for a moment, attentive and observant, before he directs the light into the back of Bucky’s throat. Then the tongue depressor retreats. “Good, looks healthy. Now I’ll have you do a couple of quick stretching exercises so I can observe your muscle structure. Could you stand up for me, please?”

Bucky does, his bare feet a little cool against the polished wooden floor. He’s a little goosebumpy again, but it’s not unpleasant. There’s definitely a breeze up his nightshirt, though, making him shuffle his legs closer together. He definitely needs to get a little more used to feeling this exposed. 

“Okay, bend over and touch your toes for me. If you need to bend your knees a little, that’s all right,” Steve says, although he knows that Bucky doesn’t. He underwent rigorous gymnastics training in the early stages of his brainwashing, back when it was the Soviets who were training him. Years later, he’s far more limber than his heavy frame would suggest, and he reaches down to the floor with ease. He definitely doesn’t feel that comfortable with the way his nightshirt slides up when he does it, and he reflexively checks with his hand to make sure his ass is still covered. It is, but _barely_ , shit, that is _breezy._ Bucky drops his hand back to the floor, face heating.

“Steve, I want you to come around to his front, about even with his shoulder so you can observe what this pose does to it,” Sam jumps in. _Sam, thank you,_ Bucky thinks silently. He really doesn’t miss a thing. 

“I’m going to touch your back now, if you can hold that pose just a little bit longer. If it gets too uncomfortable or you need a break, you just let me know, okay?” Steve waits for Bucky to nod a confirmation, hair swinging towards the floor, before he rests his hand on Bucky’s back and moves it around his shoulder blades. “Well, you’re holding your shoulders even. Do you find yourself having to compensate a lot for that weight like this?”

“Yeah,” Bucky answers, “Or, I mean, I think so. I guess I’m pretty used to working with it, so I don’t really think about it anymore. But yeah.”

“Well, that could definitely be what’s throwing off your back, though I’ll have to look at it more in a while. Could be heavy on your shoulder, too. Let’s take a break from stretching, though, and let me examine that arm more closely.”

Bucky gratefully rises and yanks at the hem at the back of his nightshirt before he slides back up onto the table. Once he’s settled into place, he’s struck with the realization that he still feels nearly as exposed as when he was bent over. He doesn’t know why—Steve’s touched his arm before, a _lot,_ and those have been some of the most peaceful experiences in this whole weird roleplay. Maybe it’s just the looming threat of a real doctor doing this instead of Steve. Maybe it’s the lack of pants.

He forces in a deep breath, briefly shutting his eyes. This is _Steve_. Nothing will happen here that hasn’t happened a thousand times before, and when it _is_ a real doctor, Steve won’t let anything happen then either. Bucky knows that. If only he could get the adrenaline flaring through his guts to understand too.

“Can you hold your arm out for me, please?” Steve asks. “Like this.” He demonstrates, holding his own hand straight out in front of him.

Bucky copies the motion. His arm whirs faintly as he positions it, then falls silent.

“Thank you,” Steve says. “Nothing should hurt, but if you feel any discomfort, let me know right away, all right?”

Bucky nods. He swallows, and even though he feels marginally calmer with every word Steve speaks, it still feels hard on his throat. 

Steve grazes Bucky’s fingertips, his touch so feather light that the prosthetic doesn’t even register it. He’s running his own fingers along Bucky’s, gradually increasing the pressure as if to acclimate Bucky to the sensation. Steve slides over the joints and between Bucky’s fingers, again and again. If there’s any medical purpose to it apart from making sure Bucky’s calm, anything a real doctor would emulate, Bucky doesn’t know what information this almost-massage could provide.

“Can you spread your fingers apart?” Steve asks softly.

The plates in his hand tense before they separate, and they don’t do that usually. There’s a sinking feeling rippling through Bucky’s stomach, though he can’t figure out why. Nothing has happened. Nothing’s going to. Sure, when the techs asked him to move his arm during an examination, there was always a good chance something was about to hurt, but Steve’s not like that. Bucky pushes down the sensation and spreads his fingers.

“Good,” Steve says. “You can put them back together.”  
  
Bucky does, and feels an instantaneous, inexplicable relief.

“Is that motion fluid?” Steve asks. “Or does anything feel like it’s catching inside when you move?”

“It’s fine.”

“It feels like it always has?”

“As far as I can remember.”

“All right.” Steve’s touching Bucky again, feeling at the back of his hand this time. “Does any part of your arm feel differently than you remember, either in motion or when you’re still? Your wrist, elbow, shoulder?”

Bucky shakes his head. He can hear Sam’s pen scratching against the notepad, and he manages not to grit his teeth. Everything he’d felt fine with before the examination started is now ramping up as they play it out. He can’t imagine how he’ll make it through the real doctor without either breaking down or snapping someone’s neck.

Then Steve’s hand is on Bucky’s wrist, gently, and just as gently he asks if he can turn Bucky’s hand over. And he does, and runs his fingers against Bucky’s palm, and there’s that weird almost-itch again that Bucky dutifully reports, and Steve stops it right away. It’s easier to breathe now. As long as Steve’s taking charge and distracting him with questions, it feels safe. Bucky doesn’t know if he’ll ever be the person that he wants to be for Steve again, but he does know that Steve will keep him safe. That’s a given. Probably it’s a constant of the universe, as unchanging as the laws of gravity.

Steve traces a finger around one of the plates on Bucky’s inner forearm, just barely slipping the tip of his nail under the rim. “Does anything ever get caught inside these?” he asks.

“Sand.” Bucky has a vague memory of a mission in a desert. “It got vacuumed out after that. If it’s raining or if I get wet, water gets in, but it drips back out eventually. All the internals are waterproof.”

“And it can’t rust?”

Bucky shakes his head. There’s not a lot of use in an assassin who could lose function in one of his limbs just from getting it bloody. He doesn’t think even the earliest versions of his prosthetic were vulnerable to liquid or oxidation.

“Do the plates come off?” Steve presses lightly against one of them. “Or do they only shift around like that to help your arm move?”  
  
“They can come off.” Bucky stares at Steve, willing himself to see his friend and not any number of half-remembered technicians that used to pry the plates back and dig around in there. “They’re fiddly to get back in place sometimes, but they pop off. For repairs.”

“Do you know how to remove them?”

Bucky nods. His skin feels cold again through the nightshirt. He doesn’t want Steve to open him up that way, not now. Not yet. It’s too close to the fragments of memories that won’t shut up in his head.

Maybe Steve senses that. “I don’t want to take anything apart right now,” he says, no longer pressing on the plating. “But if we do need to undertake an internal examination, could you demonstrate at that time?”

“Yeah,” Bucky mutters, trying to stay present and not imagine when or where or who will be around whenever that time might be.

Steve continues his examination up the arm, bending the elbow with Bucky’s permission, then rotating his shoulder in various directions. It doesn’t feel mechanical when Steve’s the one manipulating his body. He handles it as if it’s as much a part of Bucky as the rest of his limbs. Bucky can’t help but wonder if the real doctor will feel that way. He’s not sure if he wants that. With Steve, it’s natural. With anyone else, it could be uncomfortably intimate enough to circle back around to upsetting.

For a second, Steve’s hand hovers over the thick, ugly scar tissue that binds the metal into Bucky’s body. His mouth works like he’s about to ask for permission to touch again, but then he draws his hand away. Bucky feels a combination of relief—he can’t imagine Steve touching that without feeling pity for Bucky, and that’s the last thing he wants—and a certain sadness, like this is proof that Steve’s disgusted with him.

Of course he isn’t. He’s probably just reading the tension radiating off of Bucky and trying to keep from setting him off further by moving too quickly. Steve’s always been so clear that Bucky’s his Bucky no matter what’s changed. No matter what Bucky has done.

This is Steve. Steve’s not disgusted.

“Can you open the plating as far as it will go?” Steve asks. “All up and down your arm?”

It’s like the question comes from miles away and inside Bucky’s own head at the same time. His stomach plummets as if he’s jumped off a building, and this time the cold chill doesn’t go away.

_It’s just a question,_ Bucky tells himself, as if his heart isn’t hammering in his ears. _He’s not gonna dig around in there and yank on what’s left of your nerves. You can do this._ Steve and Sam have already put in so much effort to try and get Bucky capable of functioning again. He owes it to them to calm the fuck down. Sam would say he doesn’t owe them anything, but that’s bullshit.

He lets out a breath as the plates open. The space inside him looks black, blacker than Bucky ever remembers seeing before. He wishes he could just fall into that emptiness until this is over.

Steve studies his arm without touching, probably making mental notes about the width of the gaps. “Good,” he says. “You can relax your arm.”

The plates snap back into position so quickly that their usual whir is more like a shriek. If they’ve noticed that, Steve and Sam don’t let it show.

“I’d like to feel the areas where the prosthetic attaches to your body,” Steve tells him. “Is that all right?”

Bucky knows he’s allowed to say no. They’ve told him he can say no. That he _should_. But old fears are seeping into the room through the dark crevices that had opened up in his arm plating and they’re surrounding him, choking. He has to push through. He has to get functional. And so he nods.

And it’s not bad when Steve touches the thick scar lining the left side of his chest. Bucky can see his face, and it’s not disgusted at all, as he’d feared so badly earlier. It’s gentle, like this ugly patch of body is something to be revered and treated with utmost care. He continues looking and touching like that as he traces his fingers steadily down the thick pink trail of scarring, and Bucky begins to relax into it. The touch slides down to the scarring at his lower ribs where one of the main bone-reinforcing plating is secured in just under the skin, down, down down down and it’s not the hand it had been, it’s

He’s confused. He’s

in the exam room, 

isn’t he? 

That’s why the tech had wanted him to demonstrate how far his arm could go.

They wanted him to put his fist in his

made him expand the plating while it was in

“How far it can open him, help yourself” 

the tech had said to a STRIKE member. Which STRIKE member? He should know, if they’re going to want him to

or does it matter?

His breath catches, with his fist like that, it hurts like burning, a white-hot splitting him apart, but they’ve found a strange sweetness in the burning making his breath hitch and his anatomy respond with a jerk. It rapidly grows heavy and hard between his legs, weighting and dragging on the whole of him even as this piece of him calls like wanting. He’s ashamed of the calling like weakness like screaming even though he hasn’t screamed. He’s ashamed of it without knowing why. He’s ashamed it wants, not why he’s ashamed of the want but knowing it shouldn’t, like this. He thinks they’re laughing at him. He thinks, suddenly, his fist shouldn’t be there, too many things about this are all wrong for him to remember all at once. He cries while they do what they do, but silently for no punishment, and they are behind him at least so they cannot see it. He is still heavily ashamed of the crying. Still heavily ashamed of the heavily wanting dragging between, of them in his ass his cold fist in his ass

But nothing is in his ass. It doesn’t hurt. Only in his memory. And no one’s laughing at him here because HYDRA’s not here. This is Steve’s apartment, he remembers now, and the walls of Steve’s bedroom are not the walls of the med bay. They look nothing alike. Why did he—?

Something _is_ alike.

Between his legs, heavy like in his memory and _calling_ for something. His heart pounds. _No_. No, no, no, no. They must be seeing it, Sam and Steve. His nightshirt is hiding nothing, his body’s betrayal at HYDRA’s sick joke pushing, horribly eager, at the front of the fabric. They’ll see his sickness. His heart pounds and he shakes with fear and tears are welling up in his eyes like they did in the memory. They can see his tears too.

“Ah, man. Here he is. He’s coming back now.” That’s Sam’s voice. Bucky shudders and squeezes his eyes shut, the hot tears falling. They are seeing. All of him, everything. “Bucky, hey, man. You back with us?”

Back with them. He doesn’t know what to do. Nothing hurts here like it did in the memory but the memory is still here and his insides still hurt. And now they know. There will never be anything more humiliating. He feels gutted and sick and he thinks he might retch, and he tries to get his thoughts together enough to move. He slumps down onto the table and rolls on his side to face away from them, curling himself around his erection, desperate to hide it. He shoves his face over the edge of the table in case he really does puke.

“Sam,” that’s Steve’s voice, dripping with concern, “Sam, we should get out of here. He doesn’t want us to see this, look at him.”

“I don’t know if we can leave him alone in this state, Steve.”

“For all we know, we’re making it worse! Hell, if he remembered something from me and him and freaked out—”

“No,” Bucky croaks out, humiliated but desperate. “No, no, don’t leave me.” Steve’s voice is the only thing that keeps that tech’s voice at bay. Bucky never learned his name, but his voice saying “Fist yourself,” is clear as fucking day. So is the fear of Steve’s disgust, from when he was going to touch the arm before, the damned arm. Bucky taps it against the side of the table without thinking, rhythmically, sending a small _clink, clink, clink_ into the room to remind himself he’s here.

They’re standing beside him now. And Steve isn’t going away. He can feel their presence at his back, and then a sudden, soothing weight settling over him. It’s a blanket—the one from Steve’s bed. They’ve mercifully covered him, covered the erection still throbbing at the center of his curled-up core. Bucky twists up his flesh hand in the edge of the blanket and brings it to his face to hide himself, soaking up tears and breathing in the smell of Steve’s sweat and laundry soap. The comfort Steve had brought him. He’s gone and ruined it now. He doesn’t know what’s left.

“Buck, I’m so sorry,” Steve says softly. “I’m so, so sorry.”

Why is _he_ sorry? _Bucky_ fucked this up. He’s no less confused in the present than he was in his flashbacks, and it’s throwing him off.

“Whatever you remembered, I never meant for that to put any kind of pressure on—on today. You don’t—you never have to—”

“Steve.” Sam halts his apology and Bucky can hear him moving, coming to the other side of the table as if to face him, though Bucky’s face is still covered. “Bucky, hey. You’re all right now. You’re with us and you’re safe.”

With them. He doesn’t know how they can look at him after how monumentally he’s screwed this up. But Sam’s still right there with him, steady, telling him where he is and trying to coach him through breathing, so Bucky does. Sam’s taken over telling him what to do, and he automatically does it because that’s what he knows. He pulls in one shaking breath, then another. Sam keeps telling him he’s doing good. Bucky finds himself letting out an unexpected sob of relief. Of course they’ve still got him. He hasn’t ruined anything. It’s just.

He had never wanted anyone to _know_.

Sam knows. He can tell from something in his voice. And Steve doesn’t, yet. He thinks he’s the one who caused this. And Bucky can’t let him go on thinking that, or Steve will destroy himself with guilt, so he’s going to have to tell him, or Sam will do it. And then Steve will know, too. 

“Good breathing. Hey. At some point we’ll figure everything out. For now I just want you breathing.” And Bucky does, and Sam’s voice is steady as he says, “Good, Bucky. That’s good. That’s really good. It’s all right. It’s all right, Bucky. It’s all right.”

“Is it, though?” Bucky finally speaks, shivering a little. He wants it to be. He wants to believe Sam. He just can’t imagine where the hell they go from here.

“It will be,” Sam says firmly. “Bucky, can I ask you something about what just happened, or is it something you can’t think about right now?”

Bucky doesn’t think he can think about it _ever,_ but he knows what’s coming and he might as well get it over with. He can get through. It’s not like that logic has already failed him once today, right? 

He nods, pressing his face more deeply into the blanket.

“Was that about something you remembered from your time with Steve? Or was it about something else?”

He feels like the table might fall away from under him. He holds more tightly to the blanket, smelling Steve on it. “HYDRA,” he makes himself say. “It was HYDRA.”

He thinks he can hear Steve’s breath stop as he realizes. He curls tighter in. At least his erection has finally flagged. He scrubs at his face with the damp blanket, feeling a sense of calm intermingling with his dread. It’s done now. They know.

“All right.” Sam’s voice is really calm. “It wasn’t your fault, Bucky, none of it.”

Bucky doesn’t know what to think about that, or if it even matters. He got on all fours for them, and did what they said to do, and the memory of that is shame enough to wash over any fault or lack thereof.

“We are going to have to talk about this,” Sam says predictably, and Bucky’s stomach clenches up. “But not right now. Right now we’re just going to be here for you, whatever you need. So what do you need, Bucky?”

To go back. To have Steve look over him and make him safe again. But he doesn’t know if Steve will do that stuff for him now.

“Steve,” he finally mutters. He needs to know Steve isn’t mad or freaked out or disgusted or just—overwhelmed, by this. _Bucky_ is overwhelmed, and it would make sense for Steve to be, too, but Bucky just desperately needs him _not_ to be. Not to react however the hell people react to something like this.

“What do you need, Buck? I’m right here.” Steve’s voice is earnest as ever. Bucky risks taking his face out of the soggy, gross wad of blanket he’s been hiding in. His face is red and snotty, he knows, and he feels as exposed as if he were naked. But Steve is right there, and so is Sam, just like they said. Steve’s face isn’t disgusted, like Bucky couldn’t help but fear he’d be. It’s a lot of things, but not disgusted, and his eyes are red and wet but he holds Bucky’s gaze as steadily as ever, and when Bucky lets go of the blanket and reaches for him, he reaches back. Bucky moves to sit himself up and Steve pulls him there and brings him in and holds him tight.

“Don’t hate me,” Bucky whispers into his shoulder. He hadn’t even realized the plea was in him until he said it.

“Never, Buck.” Steve’s voice breaks a little and Bucky feels his breathing hitch in his chest, but he doesn’t let go.

“I did whatever they wanted. I—don’t hate me.” Bucky keeps purging it out like puke, like now that it’s started the only way to stop feeling sick is get it all out. “I let them, I let them, don’t hate me.”

“My God, Buck.” Steve’s voice strengthens, arms tightening around him. His hand is on the back of Bucky’s head now, cradling it against his shoulder. Bucky shivers, tearing up again at the tenderness of it. He hadn’t known there could be such tenderness after being ripped open like that. “I don’t hate you. I could never hate you, you hear me? Never.”

Bucky lets out a big, shaky breath, and along with it a fear he’d only peripherally realized he was holding onto—that knowing this would change something, that Steve couldn’t see him the same or love him the same if he knew. He kind of wants to cry again, but he’s suddenly too tired.

Sam brings him his clothes and they turn away while he changes. But once he’s dressed again, Steve throws an arm around him in a way that’s almost fierce and squeezes him hard. Sam brings him a glass of water and they sit with him quietly while he recovers himself a little bit more. He thinks he could sleep for years if he laid his head down, even without the cryo tank. 

Finally, Sam gets up and starts putting away the medical supplies they’d laid out, and that jars Bucky back to the question he dreads. He might as well know now if he’ll have to give it up, though.

“Did I ruin this forever?” he gestures vaguely at the table and supplies. His arm feels like it’s about a hundred pounds when he does so.

Steve freezes against his side, but Sam doesn’t miss a beat. _“You_ didn’t ruin anything, Bucky, let’s be absolutely clear about that. You had a trauma reaction to something that _wasn’t your fault._ Now, this seemed to be a really good thing for a while, maybe all we need to do is figure some stuff out. I’m not sure how to navigate this exactly or how to help you with it. But it’s going to take a hell of a lot more talking-out than I think you’ll wanna do right now. I don’t know, man. I can’t say for sure whether or not this’ll be a recurring thing now that it’s come up once, but we’ve still got your back, whatever that’s going to look like. You got it?”

Bucky nods, staring down at his knees. He’s still floored by everything they’ve said to him about these memories and what his body did when it remembered them. He can’t help but feel he’s been nothing but a burden and still, all they want is to figure out how to keep on being whatever he needs.

He sighs and lets his head rest on Steve’s shoulder. “I wanted…” he admits. He stops, then sighs. “I wanted to build something with you. Something reciprocal, and. I wanted to be. Maybe like we were, before.” He closes his eyes. “It’s the shit they did that got in the way. I was just—scared.” He shakes his head, trying to clear it, maybe get a full sentence out. He’s still scared, even now, that maybe Steve won’t want him anymore.”

“Buck.” Steve rubs his back. “I’ve told you that you don’t owe me anything like that. You do not—you do _not_ have to force yourself through something like that just because you think you have to give me something. I’d want you here no matter—”

“Shut the fuck up, Steve,” Bucky mutters, face flushing red. Steve thinks Bucky wants to re-traumatize himself by misery-fucking him. Well, maybe it’s an accurate assessment of his judgment, given today. “I’m not a fucking masochist, I’m not talking about—not _that_. Just, if we wanted to be something like that. Sleep in the same bed, take care of each other like we did. It wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world, to be a little closer. Even if you still snore.”

For a moment Bucky’s scared again, scared that Steve doesn’t want him now. His body’s a mess with a hunk of metal slapped on the side, never mind all Steve knows he’s done with it.   
But Steve’s laughing a little, Bucky realizes with a fierce leap in his heart. He really is. And he’s still holding Bucky and not letting go. “I’m not the worst thing in the world. That’s charming, Buck, you really know how to win a guy.” And he’s moving Bucky closer and kissing his forehead, just like he did after Bucky wet himself getting his hand fixed. Letting him know he still loves him. That’s how Steve lets him know, he realizes. Bucky thinks he remembers a much smaller Steve standing on tiptoe to do the same thing while he had bowed his head to let him, and for just a moment, a tiny, blessed moment, the memory banishes all of HYDRA from his mind. Bucky lets his head lean down in the present too, leaning into Steve. They stay like that for a while, just close together, breathing into the space between them.

Then Steve guides him up and takes him over to his bed, which is just as well because Bucky’s exhausted from everything they’ve just gone through. He still feels raw and wounded and vulnerable. But he knows now, at least, that Steve will let him be that way. Will still hold him and look after him. He’ll hold the worst parts, too. Of course he will. He’s Steve.

He puts Bucky in his own bed to rest and pulls the blankets over him, tucking them carefully over his shoulders, and a moment after his hand pulls away Bucky feels the mattress dip on the other side of the bed. Steve’s getting in with him. Steve’s going to watch over him. And there might be nightmares now. He’s too exhausted to fight sleep, wishing they wouldn’t come.

But Steve will take care of him after, when he wakes.

*

As waves of stimulation pool and flow through Bucky’s torso and groin, surging into his ass to meet Steve’s hand and pulsing back again, he becomes aware that the tip of his cock is wet, leaking precome, and his hospital gown is going to need changing.

It’s okay. He knows it’s okay, he can make a mess here. Be as much of a mess as he needs to be, fall apart, make noise and the room will be all confidential. No one but Steve will see, will have to know. He doesn’t have to be the Soldier after this, uphold a reputation, all he has to do is let Steve’s hand hold his ass and thrust his hips into the stroking of his cock in any way that feels natural. Move, breathe, jerk, _shudder_ with it. In this room, Steve’s the professional, one Bucky can always trust, with his body, his mounting pleasure so hard to hold back it could be pain if Bucky didn’t know that he is allowed to thrust through it and cry out with it. 

In this room, everything is confidential.

His knees dig into the vinyl of the table and as Steve’s fingers jolt the sweet spot hard, Bucky lets himself grunt and push back with his thighs, wrestling to meet that spot in Steve’s hand again, hold it, milk out that hard cry of sweet pleasure from deep within, because it _won’t_ hurt, because he _can_ let himself feel it through and through, over taking all of him, can let himself be overwhelmed.

He shudders as Steve comes so close, so, so, close. The pleasure mounts, a looming ball of expanding white-hot light from the inside. Steve’s finger’s slip over the sensitive head of Bucky’s cock, intercepting the thin strand of precome and slicking it over the very tip, _almost_ meeting the space in Bucky’s ass _just quite right_.

_Feedback,_ Bucky remembers. He can ask the doctor. Ask the doctor _anything_. It’s _his_ body, the doctor will take care of it, he has the right, he’s the patient. Steve’s hand slips over the leaking head of his cock again and he lets himself gasp out, “Steve…!”

“What is it, Buck? Tell me,” Steve commands, gripping his cock tighter. Arousal tugs at his stomach and he whines. “Good feedback, Bucky, tell me more, you’re doing good, tell me.”

It’s confidential. It’s Steve. “I’m a mess…” Bucky rasps, pleading, hoping Steve will understand. He’s scared and he _wants_ all at once, thrashing back into the slick fingers pushing into his ass. Scared to be a mess. _Wanting_ to be. He can _give_ that to Steve. Wants him to hold it, pull it all out of him, make a mess of his body ‘cause he’ll do it just _right_. He whimpers. “Please, I’m a mess, I need…”

“It’s okay. I’m a doctor. The mess is okay. I’ve got you,” Steve assures him. “What do you need, Bucky?”

It’s okay, Steve says. Bucky whines, wriggling in Steve’s slippery grasp, but that only overstimulates him harder and his head drops as he gasps, hair hanging in his face, sweating, cock wet and drooling down, a patch of spreading damp on the front of his hospital gown that he can see with his head hanging like this, ass dripping and spread-open and dripping lube. He _is_ a mess, a gasping, begging mess, and he needs it to be okay, really okay. It’s confidential. This mess is his and Steve’s. It smells like sex, like _their_ sex. The room is confidential. Bucky swallows, afraid to beg again.

“Tell me, Buck, I need patient feedback. You’re so good, doing so good, do you know that? Tell me. I need you to tell me.”

“Make me _come!”_ Bucky practically wails, and his face heats.

“I will, Bucky, you need release, you’re doing so good, I wanna get you there. Feedback. What do I do now? Where do you need me?”

“Get in my ass. Please. Deeper. And... _stay there,”_ Bucky makes himself plead.

“Good.” he’s _good_ he can say what he wants he’s _good_ for doing it and the fingers are all the way in again, full and too much and in a good way, not pain because he can shout and push back into them, wriggling.

“Stay there. Stay with me,” he begs, giving himself over to Steve with all abandon now. He told, told what he wanted, what he _needed_ and it was okay and it was _good_ it was good the doctor said so. “With your fingers. In me when I move...please...curl them.” And he gasps as Steve does, lighting surging in his body, his cock trying to push all the way up to his belly but Steve holding, squeezing, stroking, making him writhe with the pulsating sensations threatening to send him over the edge where he can go, he can because Steve will catch him. “Y-yes, like that, please, Doctor, stay there, with me.” The lightning cracks white across his vision, almost blanking him out for a second, but nothing like the lightning he’s used to seeing, only beautiful and clear with a surging path laying out before him as he thrusts. 

This time, when he pushes back with his straining thighs, shaking, Steve’s fingers hold steady and _move_ with him, pressing firmly against the spot, moving and moving wherever he moves so that the pleasure-not-pain stays mounting steadily. And Bucky can trust it. Can be overwhelmed. Writhe and shout. Sweat and give in. “Yes...please...yes, like that,” he begs again as the feeling begins to envelop him for real this time, more intense than ever before, he’s getting there grabbing onto the edge of the table and throwing his head up and back, sweaty hair flying with abandon and that’s okay too, only for him and Steve, only they can see, the room is confidential. He can hear the plates in his hand left clicking and whirring as they tighten and no one tells him to stop it, that part belongs to him, that part belongs to Steve too. “It feels...good, so good, Doctor. Please, more, stay in me stay with me I need _more.”_

“Good feedback.” The fingers curl in harder, firm and pressing ever in on the white-hot ball of expanding pleasure in Bucky’s secret sweet spot within. Bucky’s stomach surges with it now, gut tugging at his cock, all of it enveloped by the lightning. “Good job, Bucky, you’re good, such a good patient, helping me help you. You’re _perfect.”_

Perfect. He’s perfect, his doctor says, his body, his mind, him. Throwing his head back and gasping, he surrenders himself to the fingers and their pressing on the burning sweetness within, their refusal to budge, spreading him open and pressing his throbbing cock up, his slippery cock which gets squeezed at the head just once more in slick precome but it’s enough when Bucky tells the overwhelm it can take him from his belly on outward. Heat surges through his cock and Steve’s holding it tighter as Bucky gasps and calls Steve’s name. 

Sweet lightning is in all of his body, his ass and Steve’s fingers, in all of his sex now, and as it grips his belly he sighs in beautiful surrender to Steve as his warm cock spills over in rippling grips of pleasure and his vision whites out.

  
*

It’s like Steve can’t wait to be close to Bucky again. 

He was still in the bed when Bucky groggily came to. He’d expected awful dreams, but he seemed to have had a respite from them, for once. 

His head hurt a bit from crying earlier and he was still reeling a little from the realization of everything that just happened. Steve seemed to have been dealing with it too, while Bucky slept. His eyes were red when Bucky woke, and he’d been staring at the ceiling until he realized Bucky was awake. 

But then he’d taken Bucky’s hand and held on. He hasn’t let go all day.

Bucky doesn’t know how to feel, really—he guesses he’s relieved if he’s anything, but he thinks he’s just mostly in shock. He still can’t believe they both saw his body do what it did, that it all came ripping out in an awful rush like he was sliced open and his insides fell out. But they’re still here, holding steady for him. They’re careful to take cues from him on how to react, though Bucky catches Steve’s face twisting up in pain a few times, just before he turns away.

Bucky knows that set of his jaw, though. If there’s anyone left from HYDRA alive who’d touched him, at least Bucky’s certain they’ll suffer.

Sam stays with them, checking in with both of them to make sure they’re holding up okay. He’s a saint, Sam. Bucky will never underappreciate him again, even if he keeps trying to talk Bucky into seeing a shrink.

He brings that up after they have dinner, trying to make sure Bucky’s on a somewhat even keel for most of the day before trying to have any sort of real conversation with him. He mostly repeats himself. When Steve lets his calm mask slip and shows distress, Sam keeps reminding him that Steve’s not upset because of Bucky, he’s upset at the people who did these things to him. He keeps checking in and asking Bucky if he feels grounded, if he feels calm, if he’s breathing okay and if he knows they care. It helps; Bucky’s still reeling. He hadn’t even been able to consider the possibility of them knowing. And now they do, and the world hasn’t ended, and they’re still with him and moving forward.

And Steve’s hand stays in his.

It’s a lot. But he thinks maybe he’s going to be okay.

Sam orders pizza for dinner because he says they’re all still pretty rattled from what they’re processing, and none of them are likely up to cooking. He also says that pizza is definitely therapeutic, he’s a professional, he knows. And that garlic dipping sauce is extra-therapeutic.

Bucky is surprised by his appetite when the pizza comes. He hadn’t thought he’d be able to eat anything, but he finds himself reeling all over again when he bites down into the warm, aromatic pizza. It _does_ taste like comfort. He lets Sam hector him and Steve into eating more and more of it. He thinks he can _feel_ the calories hitting, leveling him out. It’s a dumbass idea to stop eating after he’s had a shitty memory come up. He’s done it before—he always struggled with the idea of carrying on and doing the things that normal people do with all that darkness weighing on him. It seemed like pretending, trying to lie to himself, and what was the point?

Sam doesn’t let him get too far down that road, though. He says Bucky should make absolutely sure he’s eating well when he’s going through something. And then he puts down his napkin and folds his hands, eyeing them both. Bucky knows that look.

“So,” he says, “Should we get the talk over with? Or do you think you need to wait?”

Steve immediately turns to Bucky like _he’s_ got no emotional stock in this situation. Bucky just shrugs and fidgets with his own napkin. He doesn’t want to be the one to decide. He’s too tired to make decisions. “I dunno,” he mutters.

“I want to do anything that helps you, Bucky,” Steve says, predictably. “But you have to tell me what you need.”

“You choose,” Bucky says. _That’s_ what he needs. He ignores the gnawing guilt at the concerned glance Steve gives him.

“All right,” Steve says finally. “If Bucky’s okay with it. Let’s talk.”

Bucky fidgets a little more with his napkin and then he remembers he can ask for things too. He’d told Steve he wanted to be closer to him. So he reaches for his hand again.

Steve takes it and squeezes, and gives him a small but very real smile. Bucky squeezes back.

Sam thinks a moment, tapping his fingers lightly against the table. “Okay,” he says finally. “So there are a few things we need to deal with, and I’m trying to think about what we should go over first. But I’m thinking,” he says, looking pointedly at Bucky, “About safewords and their importance.”

_Oh._ Bucky lowers his head and holds onto Steve’s hand a little tighter. Yeah. He fucked that up, didn’t he?

“Beating on yourself is pointless,” Sam says, still in that pointed tone like he can tell that’s what Bucky’s doing, “But we need to prevent this from happening in the future, and safewording is part of that. I think I’m right, that you weren’t quite okay before you had that episode?”

Bucky’s face heats. He nods, feeling like a dumbass even though Sam’s told him not to beat on himself.

“And that there were a few times you could have safeworded?”

Bucky nods again. Steve squeezes his hand tightly.

“And can you tell us why you didn’t?”

He wishes he didn’t have to get into it, but he knows he scared them, and they’ll probably never roleplay with him again if he doesn’t talk about it. “The other times, it made me feel good. I wanted to just push through it so I could just feel good again.”

“Is pushing through it a good idea?”

He shakes his head, face burning. “I thought I should just be able to handle it,” he mutters.

“You always say you can get through. But you know that can have consequences—for all of us, not just you. And you also know that you don’t have to push through. This isn’t HYDRA.”

“I wanted to just get used to it,” he bursts out. “I thought if I’d just pushed through, you guys could make it good like you made everything else good. And then once I realized it was bad, my head was in _that_ place where I couldn’t say—” He cuts himself off. He’s realizing as he says it that this isn’t a great defense of his rationale. “Yeah, I get it. I fucked up.”

Steve’s squeezing onto him painfully tight and probably torturing himself about how _he_ did that to Bucky, and that’s Bucky’s fault. He can’t look up.

“Listen, this is why safewords are important. You trust us to keep you safe, we trust you to make sure we can do that. So if we’re going to do this, we need to know you’ll be honest with us about where your mind is at. And I think we should take time tomorrow to come up with a handful of safewords that mean different things, so that you can give us a full range of feedback without having to use the word “no” if you’re too scared to use it, and we’ll still know what you mean. Safewords can mean “slow down” or other things besides just “stop”. We could employ a few new ones, but, Bucky, but you have to promise—promise us—you’ll really _use_ them.” Sam pauses until Bucky glances up at him, letting the silence hang for emphasis. “And when Steve checks in with you, like he was doing, you answer. Honestly.”

Bucky nods again. It’s all he can do.

“All right. We’re going to get into that tomorrow. I don’t want to put you in the hot seat after a day like this. Today was the hardest on you, Bucky, I’m just saying that it’s not nothing for Steve to feel like he’s the one who—who caused you to get hurt.”

“Sam,” Steve protests, “Today’s been hard enough on him—”

“ _And_ on you, and it’s not sustainable for you to ignore your own pain to help him,” Sam says, calm but stubborn. A quick glance at Steve shows a kind of constipated look, like Sam’s said something _indecent_ by suggesting he has _pain_. Even though he’s still swimming in guilt it kind of makes Bucky want to laugh at him, but he represses the urge. Hell, it’s something he’s been worrying about from the beginning, that he’ll be too much for Steve. That he’s hurting him more by being here than if he’d just never showed up.

Bucky squashes that thought down. There have been times Steve was happy with him here, there were. And there’ll be more. Just because today sucks doesn’t mean there can’t be. 

“All I’m saying is, you _know_ we’re not HYDRA, and that we _don’t_ want to hurt you. So you gotta tell us how not to. Feedback. Feedback is good, remember? Helps us do this better for you?” 

He nods again. Sam’s right, he wasn’t doing that. “I wanted to get to where I could be calm about the arm,” he mutters. “I just wanted to get there and get it done with.”

“And we could have tried again,” Sam says firmly. “Still can, another day.”

He doesn’t know why he’s still arguing the point. He _is_ sorry. And everything Sam’s saying sounds so logical _now_. It was just too frustrating, then, to be too defective and hung-up to continue with his therapy that really did feel _good_. And then Sam’s right, being frustrated made him let unsafe things happen. He just keeps thinking in circles now. He doesn’t really know where to land. He sighs, frustrated all over again. “Can we deal with this when we talk about the safeword thing?”

“Yeah, all right,” Sam relents. “Kind of a lot to think about after a day like this. And I’m sorry, but you’re not gonna love the second thing either.”

Well, at least he knows they’re not going to tell him they have to stop doing medical roleplay. He supposes he should be grateful, and talk about whatever Sam wants him to talk about if it means he gets to keep this. Still, he lets go of Steve’s hand and scoots his chair towards him, slumping down against his shoulder. Steve pulls him in close and briefly tucks his chin over Bucky’s head, protective. If any one good thing has come out of this shitty, godawful day, at least he knows he’s allowed to be as close and needy with Steve as he wants. There’s precedent for it; it’s not that weird.  
  
“So we’re talking about the therapy thing,” Sam says, his face as calm as ever. Bucky is not calm. Though Steve’s arms are warm, he feels like he’s been doused in ice water. “No,” he gasps out, involuntary. That means Sam wants him to tell about... _that_ shit, all that, to a _stranger_ , what they did, what he let them do. “Please, no, no, no. Don’t make me do _that_.” He’s shaking his head into Steve’s shirt. He sounds and looks pathetic, he realizes, but what else is new.

Steve’s holding him tight, stroking a hand down his back. Bucky tries to get a deep breath in, pull himself together. He can only imagine the worried looks they’re giving each other over his head.

“I won’t make you do anything.” Sam’s voice softens for the first time since they started this whole talk. “But, Bucky, there are people who specifically provide help for things like that. For sexual trauma.”

Bucky shivers a little under Steve’s arm. Saying the words _sexual trauma_ somehow makes it more real. He really told them. That’s what he has, sexual trauma. He stays silent. He doesn’t know what to think. He can’t imagine _saying_ the shit they did to anyone. Having it on some _file_.

“You’re not alone in this, Bucky.” Sam’s voice stays soft now. “You’re not. War, torture, cult programming, sexual abuse—there are therapies for all of those things. Some of them tend to go hand-in-hand, actually, just because the world’s such a fucked-up place.” His voice has briefly gone a bit hard, but it’s softened when he speaks again. “But that does mean there are resources to help you, Bucky, and people who’ll understand.”

Bucky doesn’t really know what to think about that. For a moment he just closes his eyes and takes in the smell of Steve. Steve means safety.

“I thought I could see a doctor about my arm, too,” he says finally. It’s a cop-out and he knows it, but it’s just too hard to make sense of everything Sam is saying. He hadn’t spend much time thinking about it, hadn’t really wanted to, but if he’s honest with himself he knows what rape is and it’s not surprising there’d be shrinks for it. He internally cringes away from applying that word to himself— _rape. Sexual trauma_. It’s weird to think of himself like that. Of the fucked up shit HYDRA made him do in those terms.

“Maybe, maybe I _could_ talk to a shrink about HYDRA, if you did the vetting,” he gets out finally. “But—I don’t think I could tell anyone about _that_ shit.”

There’s the sound of chair legs scraping; Sam’s bringing his chair closer to them. Bucky almost flinches, but when he glances up, Sam’s eyes are steady and warm.

“I’m not gonna lie to you, finding out you’re dealing with this is what makes me think the therapy discussion can’t really wait,” he says, gentle but unrelenting. “Look, you don’t have to go in and tell anyone anything in the first session. It’ll take time for me to vet a few people, anyway, and it’ll have to be someone with extensive qualifications. But I already told you that Steve and I can’t be your therapists. And we are wildly underqualified to be your sexual abuse counselors,” he says frankly. But his eyes stay warm and kind the whole time. He’s still not judging Bucky for what happened. He’s really not. “And sexual abuse as a method of torture is—well, it’s not unheard of. It’s a hard thing to get through. I know a couple of people who—did experience these things. So when I said you’re not alone—I know. I know for a fact.”

That catches Bucky’s attention. What they’d made of him on his knees—he can’t imagine anyone else knowing what it’s like to feel like _that_. Something inhuman still lurks in his mind when he hears _fist yourself_ and remembers how he complied without a second thought. But Sam hasn’t faltered like this all night. This is something difficult, Bucky realizes. Something _he_ doesn’t like to tell. He’s reaching out first, because he knows that Bucky can’t.

“I had a friend,” Sam said quietly, “We got close, when I first started getting group therapy. We were both pretty messed up then, we weren’t _like that._ But I thought, someday, you know?” For the first time that evening, Sam’s the one who has to look away. “Before she told me.” 

_Oh._

Steve reaches over with his free hand to take Bucky’s again.

“It was a senior officer who hurt her, someone she should’ve been able to trust. And she reported it, and no one did a damn thing. And then she had to work with him for months.” Sam shakes his head. Bucky feels a new sort of shame pooling in his stomach. Sam’s the one who’s always the most held-together, of the three of them, and Bucky had never really imagined there’s anything he can’t pull through, anything he’s still dealing with.

He should know better than that.

“She took a job offer out on the West Coast, not long after she told me. I’d been hoping she’d talk about it in a group session, but she just couldn’t. And I think even me knowing made her skittish. Unsure. Maybe she was running away from me, maybe she just thought she could outrun all of it. Or maybe she just thought the job would be good for her. A national parks gig, environmental protections. Out in the redwoods, away from people a lot of the time. Seemed like a good place for recovery at the time, but she lost her entire support system when she went and it was...harder than she predicted,” Sam says slowly. He’s still not looking up, and a familiar sort of dread is pooling up in Bucky’s stomach. 

“She kept in touch with a few of us at first, but it was pretty obvious she was struggling. Then she mostly stopped communicating.” Sam pauses. “Then we lost her.”

Bucky and Steve are both quiet, Steve holding tight to Bucky. They don’t have to ask what Sam means by that.

“She was found just outside her apartment,” Sam says softly. “It wasn’t like—Riley and I, you know, we’d gone way back, trained together, run missions together—I only knew her a few months, and it was pretty clear she was messed up from what happened to her. But it was a weird time in my life, after that. Thinking about how it happens in our military, too, and everyone in the group just wondering if we could have done anything.”

He doesn’t seem to know how to end what he was saying after that. They just sit there for a minute, then Bucky wordlessly reaches out his hand. If he’s allowed to be a clingy mess, Sam should get the chance. He’s been in this with them from the beginning. 

It’s his metal hand that he extends, so it takes a moment for him to register the warmth of Sam’s hand in his. He tugs insistently and Sam scoots his chair in. “Fuck,” he says roughly, letting Steve reach his arm out and kind of squish him into the pile of comfort. Bucky carefully moves his arm so Sam’s not crushed up against the cold metal and he ends up sandwiched warmly between the two, just feeling their rhythmic breathing.

“Fine,” Bucky mutters abruptly. “ _If_ you can find someone good, I’ll see a shrink.”

For some reason that makes Sam laugh. He seems to be trying to stop it, and it keeps coming out of him in bursts. “That wasn’t even where I was going with that,” he admits finally. “I wanted Bucky to know he wasn’t alone and then I was—fuck.” He carefully takes a deep breath and pulls away.

“I said I’d go. I never promised I’d _talk_ to the guy,” Bucky says, a little defiant. He doesn’t know what else to say, just because Sam’s the one who’s usually in control of himself. But it seems like everyone gets a turn today. Sam gets up and busies himself putting away the leftovers, and Steve and Bucky take the hint and let him gather himself in peace.

Steve cups the back of Bucky’s head and kisses his forehead again and Bucky leans right into it. It’s Steve’s _I still love you_. Their day’s been so fucked it feels like the world could’ve gone entirely crazy, but Steve’s still _got_ him. Emboldened, Bucky leans up to push his forehead against Steve’s and then realizes how close this puts their lips, so nearly kissing. He can vaguely taste Steve’s breath in his face. It tastes like pizza and garlic, but Bucky kind of still wants to be close to him anyway. 

But then Steve pulls back, and his pupils are definitely a little bit dilated. 

_Oh._

Oops.

“Bucky,” he says finally, “I’m not...I want.” He’s so flustered. “I want to do what you want. But not _more_ than you want. We talked about how you know you don’t have to…”

Ah, shit. If there’s one thing Bucky’s sure of, it’s that no one has it in them for another Talk today. “I don’t _have_ to,” he mutters, “It’s not torture to just be _close_ to you, asshole. Even if you’ve got the worst garlic breath.”

“I just don’t wanna hurt you.” So predictable, Steve. “I just wanna know where the lines are. So we’re not gonna—”

“Fuck?” Bucky almost smirks, which is maybe a little deflection; he can’t really think about doing that right now, and there’s only way he’s ever done things he can’t think about doing. “Pretty sure you need to be wearing a labcoat to gain entry, Rogers.”

He kind of wishes he could roll it back. It’s the kind of dark humor the STRIKE team used to throw around, and the closest he’s gotten to telling Steve exactly how the fucked-up sex stuff went down, how they took all the control they had over his body, like a puppet on strings, and twisted it even further, and further, and further. There’s a big part of him that’s still screaming _no no no you can’t let him know._

Then wishes he could roll it back for another reason—Steve’s pupils dilate _further_ , eyes shining now, and he seems unaware that his lips have parted slightly. This day is so weird. So, so weird. “Oh, my God, you’re _thinking_ about it,” he blurts out.

“Bucky—” Steve is so flustered. Poor guy, he doesn’t know what to do. Bucky should diffuse the whole thing as a joke except now—

Now _he’s_ thinking about it. 

Because he already lets Steve touch him like they touched him. Make him safe, make it all safe. And if Steve could reach into him and make _that_ safe. He’s already shown earlier when Bucky had the flashback that he’s not turning away, so—

“No. No way.” Steve’s looking into his eyes, and Bucky has to duck, blushing. But now he’s thinking thoughts he’d never allowed before. Steve’s calloused hands on his ass, Steve _telling him what to do._ “There’s no way we’re actually thinking about this. Are we actually thinking about this?”

For the second time that day, Bucky’s feeling a surge rushing to his groin. He feels heady, both giddy and unsure at the same time. This could be a really bad idea. This is all so fast, and how the fuck did his day go from...from _that_ to _this?_

But. “You hold parts of me that need it. If you could really—and you could hold _that_.” Bucky’s the one who’s flustered now. It’s too vulnerable. He can’t say it. He can’t. But _if_. 

God, he’s so fucked up. He really wants Steve to fuck him in a lab coat because his captors fucked him in lab coats. But they already _do_ weird roleplay. What’s a step deeper, really, when Steve’s looking at him, slightly flushed and barely coherent?

Sam loudly clears his throat, and God, they got so wrapped up in each other they forgot he was in the _room_. It’s like purging out everything he hadn’t let himself think has opened up a whole new realm of possibilities for what he can think and feel, and he remembers now why he could never keep his hands off Steve and why he used to have to kiss him before he’d even washed the charcoal residue off his hands, “If you are talking about what I think you’re talking about,” Sam says sternly, “And I have no idea if that’s a good idea _at all_ , but if you’re doing _that_ in the doctor’s office, the doctor’s assistant is taking a sick day. Y’all are doing that on your _own_.”

The tension bleeds out of the room, and Bucky snorts a laugh, then Steve follows suit.

But when Sam finally goes home for the night, there’s nothing to keep them from looking at each other and thinking about it. Bucky’s not sure if that’s a good thing.

“It’s not like we could just jump right into it,” Steve finally offers later that night once they’ve gotten into bed. Sharing, again, and if there are nightmares they’ll have each other right there. They’ve both been glancing at each other, trying not to talk about it or think about it. It’s making them both nervous to think about actually trying to have sex again, let alone the batshit crazy idea of trying to do it like _that_ , but there’s also a weird twinge of excitement in Bucky. Steve saw, he held strong for him, made him feel so loved and so held.

Bucky wants _more_. He _needs_ more. “We’d have to build up to it,” he says.

Steve’s face goes serious. “It would involve a lot of talking before,” he says. “You’d have to tell me some things that you want me to work through with you.”

Meaning Bucky will have to start telling him exactly how he was fucked, when HYDRA used him. Damn it.

“What do you get out of doing this?” He asks by way of temporary deflection, at least until he can think about that without having a panic attack. “I mean, besides just helping me. I could see you, Rogers. You _liked_ that idea.” He smirks again. “I wanna know why.”

“It’s like you said before,” Steve says immediately, turning all sincere and sappy in a way that makes Bucky kind of tempted to whack him with a pillow. “I can just hold those parts of you, Buck. Even before I could really touch you, or be close like we used to be. And I didn’t know why you couldn’t then, but I just really want to get to hold those parts of you. And then you just give them to me, and it’s like…” He sighs. “I never wanted to let you hold the hurting parts of me, before. And then I’d get sick and you’d just do it, and you never made me feel bad about needing it. And it’d hit me all over again, I could trust you, I could... _need_ you,” he says softly. “Most people use it against you if you need them too hard, and I had to get as tough as I could. And then I’d be with you and just remember out of the blue that I didn’t have to do that anymore. And it makes me feel good—makes me feel _honored_ when you can trust me in that way now. Like I’m important, but only when I’m with you.”

Bucky is struck by sadness that Steve _doesn’t_ feel important _without_ him, but it makes sense, from what Sam’s told him of how Steve was before Bucky came back. But he’s talked out as much heavy shit as he can manage for the day, so that discussion will have to wait, so instead Bucky says “I guess it’s not the worst sign in the world if it’s me _trusting_ you that gets you off.”

He discovers that Steve also experiences urges to whack him with a pillow.

“We’re gonna have to go online again and research safeguards a lot,” Steve says when their laughter has finally died down. “Ugh, you know it’s gonna be like ninety percent research and preparation to ten percent actual…”

Those roleplay websites. “Let’s not look at the ones where people dress like little kids when they fuck again, okay?”

“Agreed,” Steve says immediately. “There are some things about this world I could have lived without knowing.”

“It’s probably better that we have to prep a lot,” Bucky points out, “If it’s going to be a while before we’re sure we’re, you know, ready. We might as well have something to do.”

“Yeah,” Steve thinks about it. “I don’t wanna hurt you, you know that? So it makes me nervous to think about really doing this.”

“Me, too,” Bucky’s glad they’re feeling the same way, at least. “Like, we’re definitely weirdos for this and I still can’t believe we’re still even talking about it, but…” His face is hot, and he briefly yanks up the covers to hide it. “God. I also can’t believe how much I _wanna_.”

“Oh, God, _Bucky_.” Steve moves in to rest his head on Bucky’s shoulder and curls slowly into him, sighing. “We are so fucked, aren’t we?”

“We sure are,” Bucky says cheerfully, and curls himself right into Steve’s warmth. “Damn right, we’re fucked. Always have been.”

*

When Bucky comes, it lasts on and on and on, and Steve has him through all of it. He’s loud when he does, and he gasps, and gasps again as Steve keeps stroking it out of him, fingers curled into his prostate so hard he can’t keep from thrashing and that’s okay and good because Steve’s here and Steve’s the one who’s got him, his noise, his body, his being, his orgasm that’s lasting and lasting, the warm stickiness slicking his groin. Steve’s fingers are slick too, twisting and exploring the head of his cock, making him shudder. It pools down in the front of his hospital gown, smelling of salt and sex. And they made that, they did it. It feels like they built something new and phenomenal.

Bucky laughs a little at the absurdity of it all as he finally shudders out his last, Steve milking him for every bit of orgasm, and he collapses down onto the table into his own sticky mess. Steve slowly, carefully slides his fingers out of Bucky’s ass, leaving him cold and wide-open, dripping lube. But he pulls the back of the hospital gown around him, and now it’s sticky front to back, but it’s okay, it’s all okay. Bucky’s part done, he lets himself relax, awash in the glow of what he’s just done with Steve, as he hears Steve fumbling around under his lab coat to get himself off. They’ve agreed that Bucky isn’t going to be responsible for that for now; his only job is to let Steve be the doctor, take care of his body. 

It’s still kind of exciting to listen to Steve rustling around under that coat as he says, “Lie there for a moment, Bucky, and just rest,” with his voice deeper than usual, all breathless. To hear him rubbing himself frantically with the hands that were just on Bucky’s cock and in his ass, still wet with lube and with his come. To know that he’s excited by all this too, by Bucky, that he loves to hold him, control him, that Bucky gives all of his trust to Steve in that.

That Steve’s right there in this with Bucky, loving and being excited by this thing that they’ve created. Bucky listens contentedly to the rhythmic slapping noise as Steve’s slick hand finds its stroking pattern. He gets to know that Steve loves holding him, holding this, just as much as Bucky loves being held.

He’s almost tempted to give the edge of the hospital gown a tug, let it fall open and expose his loose, dripping asshold and his wet, flagging cock, see if that does anything to the noises Steve makes. His heartbeat speeds up against the table and his cock twitches a bit again, even though Steve’s just milked him dry.

But no. There’ll be time for that another time. They’ve done this so well, he shouldn’t push it, and trying to help Steve get off at all is not the doctor’s orders. Now that they know this is a success, there are a million possibilities, and Bucky can lay here all calm and fucked-out, reveling in all of them. Steve grunts, gasping a little and stroking himself slower and harder, and Bucky can tell that he’s come. A moment later the edge of his hospital gown is tugged, and Bucky can tell that Steve is wiping his cock dry on it.

“Doctor _Rogers,_ ” he says lazily, pretending to be shocked as he turns his head to the side with a smirk. Steve blushes a little but maintains his composure as he tucks his cock away in his coat again. 

“Hold on, Bucky. Rest and wait here. I think you need some care after this procedure.” And oh, there’s _more_? He waits eagerly to see what Steve will do for him next.

He doesn’t like being left alone with his ass all cold and sticky, but Steve comes back soon armed with warm washcloths, the nightshirt they’d used before they got a real hospital gown, and a bottle of juice. 

He carefully tugs Bucky’s hospital gown open and guides his arms out of it, leaving Bucky’s back and his ass fully exposed as the garment hangs off the table. Then he carefully wipes Bucky’s ass and the backs of his thighs, going in gentle with the warm cloth. As always, he tells Bucky where he’s going to touch before he does it, and he gently maneuvers his legs to clean the insides of his thighs. Bucky moves whatever Steve tells him to move, but mostly he doesn’t have to move at all, because Steve takes care of everything for him. Cleanup with HYDRA was a cold, quick hose-down with a pressure hose in a utility shower, but Steve said he wouldn’t dream of providing such subpar care to his patient. And it’s nice to have every part of him paid attention to in the best possible way, like every part is deserving of reverence. 

He even cleans Bucky's shoulders and neck and back, wiping up the lube he'd gotten there before from touching him, and he rubs with the warm cloth in rhythmic circles, soft and soothing, for a few moments longer than necessary. The gentle motion works a sigh out of Bucky. He hadn't thought he could get more relaxed.

“I’m going to sit you up now, if you’ll work with me.” Steve holds a warm washcloth in Bucky’s asscrack as he slips an arm under Bucky’s torso and guides him to sit up onto his knees on the table. It feels a little weird, but then it makes sense when Bucky feels a bit more lube ooze out of his loosened ass. He gets a little hot in the face at how weird it all is, but Steve remains clinical as ever and carefully holds the washcloth in place for a few seconds before wiping the warm, sticky drops away. “Bring your legs over the edge of the table now.”

Bucky’s out of the cloth gown now, fully naked and exposed, his bare ass on the vinyl table, his sticky cock now limp in his lap. Though the exposure feels a little vulnerable and weird, it’s not that bad with Steve there. Steve can hold this too; Steve can hold everything. He moves carefully as Steve directs and Steve guides him with a hand on his bare ribs. It’s not really necessary but it feels extra-nice, all the gentleness and attentiveness that would have been deemed unnecessary in HYDRA, so much humanity in the touch he craves so much. He carefully lowers his legs over the side and lets Steve spread them aside to clean his cock and balls.

It feels a little funny, but Steve frowns and examines them carefully, like he’s mentally taking notes. His eyes are carefully, calmly attentive above the now-rumpled medical mask. He doesn’t scold Bucky for squirming, only informs him that his genitals are looking to be in quite good condition after the procedure, and that they only need a gentle cleaning so they’ll remain healthy during procedure recovery. Bucky nods, still stunned and amazed at what they’ve just done. He meekly spreads his legs and lets Steve carefully wipe the warm, comforting cloths over every inch of his groin, even though he has to squirm a little more at how sensitive the area still is. He pays attention to Bucky’s pubic hair and the area around his cock, making sure there’s no residual stickiness to become itchy and uncomfortable caught anywhere in there, and when he’s finally done, he insists on bringing the warm, clean nightshirt over his head and carefully guiding both of Bucky’s arms, equally gentle with flesh and whirring metal, through the sleeves. “To reduce the chance of patient injury following a procedure,” he explains, his voice still very serious.

Still sensitive and needy following everything he’s just done, Bucky’s really not going to fight if Steve wants to take care of him even more, hold him a little longer in the feeling of the scene they’ve created.

“Now,” Steve announces, “You’ve just undergone a lot of rigorous strain, and you’ve lost some fluids as well.” Bucky doesn’t know how he keeps a straight face with some of this stuff. “So you’re going to take some bed rest, and you’ll need rehydration, and you’re not walking to bed. Doctor’s orders,” he says firmly, which is enough to keep Bucky so far down in his patient headspace that he doesn’t even question it when Steve wraps his arms under his shoulders and around his legs, scooping him up off the examination table. He’s not going to be used for anything; his doctor is only here to care for him. Bucky rests his cheek against the fabric of the lab coat and allows Doctor Rogers to carry him from the table to the bed and lay him gingerly down with the bottle of orange juice, carefully pulling the blankets up over him.

It’s probably not standard for doctors to crawl into bed with a patient on bed rest, but Bucky’s not going to complain when Steve does, tugging off the paper mask and letting it fall into the middle of the bed. Bucky sucks up the orange juice, surprised anew by just how tangy, sweet, and flavorful something can be after being pushed so hard to his limits and back. Steve was right; he _is_ thirsty. He lets Steve curl around him, his bare ass pressed against the fabric of the lab coat, sunlight filtering in over them both. Steve’s soft breath in his hair is strangely soothing. The pair of them share their warmth and the last of the headspace they’d built together for a long, long time, relaxing into one another.

“Steve,” Bucky says, “You know what would be really healing to a patient in recovery?”

“Hmm?” Steve’s voice vibrates against the back of Bucky’s neck as Steve presses a kiss there. Bucky feels like he could sink still farther into Steve, into the blankets and pillows.

“Therapeutic pizza.”

“I see. Garlic sauce?”

“Yeah. I guess I could still stand to kiss you.” Steve swats at the side of his bare asscheek, making Bucky yelp a little, and then they both start laughing.

“That’s good,” Steve finally says, in his serious, clinical voice, “Because both garlic sauce and kissing are going to be a vital part of your post-procedural recovery plan. You’re going need a lot of them both.” His fingers gently push Bucky’s hair aside to press his lips to the back of his neck once again, and as he does his voice drops to a deep, commanding timbre, making Bucky shiver and his stomach give a low tug on his groin once again. 

“Doctor’s orders.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ageplay and other coping methods I mentioned in this fic are all definitely more complex than I explained them here. They weren’t the focus of this story, so I didn’t give more than a cursory explanation of either (through Bucky’s somewhat-biased viewpoint), but I want it on the record that we do not judge people who use any form of ageplay or any sort of therapeutic interest/engagement/roleplay in their lives, as long as it is done consensually among all involved parties and the appropriate tags are used in online participation.
> 
> I also thought you should know some runners-up for the title of this fic, including "I Need Something Stronger That'll Last a Little Longer" and (thanks, Lauralot) "The Doctor is In (Your Ass)".
> 
> Also disclaimer that I'm definitely not a sex therapist and as far as I know, Therapeutic Fucking is absolutely not the way to deal with this kind of thing. But for the sake of this story, we're going to pretend. Hey, who knows? It could be a thing.


End file.
